Performance

Apple Hill String Quartet

with Sally Pinkas

November 08, 2022

This event occurred as part of the 22/23 Hop Presents season. This is an archived view.

A musical odyssey spanning continents and centuries.

22/23 Hop Presents

Our pianist-in-residence joins the quartet as they kick off their year-long residency at the Hop with a stunningly varied concert. With every program, Apple Hill aims to amplify new voices, views and backgrounds in classical music and to represent their global travels. Here they perform piano quintets by the French 19th-century composer César Franck and South African Bongani Ndodana-Breen (b. 1975) as well as the String Quartet Ragamala (2013) by Reena Esmail (b. 1983).

A conversation with the artists follows.

Generously supported by the Frank L. Harrington 1924 Fund No. 3, the Arthur J. 1903 and Nellie Z. Cohen Fund and the Nathan W. Pearson 1932 and Sons Fund.

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The Apple Hill String Quartet are the Artistic Directors and resident musicians at the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music, winner of the CMAcclaim award from Chamber Music America. The Quartet serves as the Music Directors for Apple Hill's Summer Chamber Music Workshop in Nelson, New Hampshire, cultivating connection and understanding among people of diverse backgrounds, cultures, playing levels, and ages through music performance and education centered around the values of acceptance, inclusivity, creative expression and encouragement.

The Quartet has collaborated with members of the Brentano String Quartet, Silk Road Ensemble, Dorian Wind Quintet, Hirsch-Pinkas Piano Duo, New York Philharmonic, and Community MusicWorks in Providence, Rhode Island. Members of the Quartet have received degrees from Oberlin Conservatory, the Juilliard School, Peabody Conservatory, New England Conservatory of Music, Manhattan School of Music, SUNY Stonybrook and a Fulbright Fellowship to London, England.

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Sally Pinkas
Following her London debut at Wigmore Hall, Israeli-born pianist Sally Pinkas has garnered acclaim for her performances as soloist and chamber musician. Among highlights are performances with the Boston Pops, the Aspen Philharmonia and New York's Jupiter Symphony, and at the festivals of Marlboro, Aspen, Rockport (USA), Pontlevoy (France), Havana (Cuba) and HCMC Conservatory (Vietnam). From a first-ever performance of Beethoven's Emperor Concerto in Bandung, Indonesia, to premieres of George Rochberg's monumental Circles of Fire for two pianos in Russia and Nigeria, and a revival of rarely-heard 19th-century Filipino Salon Music in its birth city Manila, Pinkas commands a wide repertoire and shares it enthusiastically with young pianists through masterclasses and workshops. Pinkas holds performance degrees from Indiana University and the New England Conservatory of Music, and a PhD in Composition from Brandeis University. Her principal teachers were Russell Sherman, George Sebok, Luise Vosgerchian and Genia Bar-Niv (piano), Sergiu Natra (composition), and Robert Koff (chamber music). Pianist-in-residence at the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College, she is Professor of Music at Dartmouth's Music Department.

Program

The Project

Hopkins Center for the Arts
presents

Apple Hill String Quartet

with Sally Pinkas, piano

Tuesday, November 8, 7:30 pm

Spaulding Auditorium • Dartmouth College • 2022

Generously supported by the Frank L. Harrington 1924 Fund No. 3, the Arthur J. 1903 and Nellie Z. Cohen Fund and the Nathan W. Pearson 1932 and Sons Fund.

Spaulding Auditorium’s Hamburg Steinway concert grand piano was purchased with generous gifts from Members of the Hopkins Center and Members of the Hood Museum of Art; the class of 1942, in memory of Allan Dingwall ’42; and anonymous donors. Its New York Steinway concert grand piano was restored with a generous gift by Huntley Allison ’42 P’74.

Apple Hill String Quartet
Elise Kuder, violin
Jesse MacDonald, violin
Mike Kelley, viola
Rupert Thompson, cello

Sally Pinkas, piano

Program

Approximate duration: 90 minutes including intermission

Safika: Three Tales of African Migration Bongani Ndodana-Breen (b. 1975)
I
II
III

String Quartet (Ragamala) Reena Esmail (b. 1983)
Fantasie (Bihag)
Scherzo (Malkauns)
Recitative (Basant)
Rondo (Jōg)

Intermission

Piano Quintet in F Minor César Franck (1822–1890)
Molto moderato quasi lento—Allegro
Lento, con molto sentimento
Allegro non troppo, ma con fuoco

Program Notes

Bongani Ndodana-Breen
Safika: Three Tales of African Migration

Xhosa composer Bongani Ndodana-Breen was born in 1975 in Queenstown, South Africa. He wrote Safika: Three Tales of African Migration in 2012 for the Stellenbosch International Chamber Music Festival. The following note is from the composer.

Migration and forced translocation have always been key themes in the historical narrative of the Black experience in South Africa. These three movements of Safika are personal responses/reflections to the various journeys that affected and shaped many of our people after the trauma of colonial dispossession. Post-apartheid South Africa continues to live with the sociopolitical consequences of this history of migration.

The shifting and uprooting took three basic forms. The journey from the village as cheap labour in the grueling mines of Johannesburg, tearing families apart as men were not permitted to be accompanied by their families in the all-male hostels at the mines. The journey of dispossession, forced removal and displacement of urban Black families bundled up by the authorities to some reservation or “homeland” they had no connection to. Finally, the journeys of political dissenters into exile in Lesotho, Eswati, Zambia and beyond.

The unifying factor in all those who were touched by these journeys is memory. Remembering the lives left behind, the people, the songs, the dances, the connection to the land. Time might wear away the detail and new experiences splinter memories to fragments but nothing is completely erased. A certain driving rhythm, a flash of timbre, a fragment of melody, a cadence, a turn of musical phrase, even a few dance steps. These stay within as faint echoes, repeated sequences sometimes layered over each other, stuttering, staggering or sometimes as clear lyrical songs and dances, vibrant as the day
first experienced.

Safika means we arrived in Xhosa and in the context of these pieces, is an allegorical terminus of these journeys where reflection, affirmation and restoration begins.

Bongani Ndodana-Breen

Reena Esmail
String Quartet (Ragamala)

Indian-American composer Reena Esmail was born in Chicago in 1983. She wrote her String Quartet (Ragamala) for the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival in 2013, where it was premiered by the FLUX quartet. Below is the composer’s own note for the piece.

During the year I spent in India, I began to notice a beautiful thing that would happen at concerts. When the artist would announce the raag to be sung or played that evening, immediately, and almost subconsciously, many of the cognoscenti in the audience would begin humming the characteristic phrases or ‘pakads’ of that raag quietly to themselves, intoning with the drone that was already sounding on stage. It had a magical feeling—as if that raag was present in the air, and tiny wisps of it were already starting to precipitate into the audible world in anticipation of the performance. It felt like a connection between the audience and the performer, as they prepared themselves to enjoy what was to come. Each movement of this quartet opens in exactly the same way, and it is inspired by those quiet intonations.

After the opening phrases, each movement diverges into its own distinct character. The first movement is a Fantasie inspired by the beautiful raag Bihag which layers phrases over one another to create large shapes separated by the silence of pure drones. The second movement is a vivacious and rhythmic setting of a Malkauns taan, which to the western ear, always seems to be pulling to a dominant rather than a tonic. The third movement is in the contemplative Basant—a raag that signifies the season of spring in Hindustani music. And the fourth movement is in the complex and multi-faceted Jog, a single raag which seems to contain western notions of both ‘major’ and ‘minor’ within it.

In Hindustani music, the elaboration of a single raag can often take an hour. I didn’t mean for this piece to exhaust these raags, but rather provide little snapshots of particular features and characters of each raag that I find beautiful and special about each one.

Reena Esmail

César Franck
Piano Quintet in F Minor

César Franck was born on December 10, 1822, in Liège (then, before the Belgian Revolution, under Dutch rule) and died in Paris on November 8, 1890. He wrote his piano quintet in 1879; violinist Martin Pierre Marsick’s ensemble premiered the work at the Société Nationale on January 17 of the following year with Camille Saint-Saëns at the piano.

Today, César Franck is best known for a handful of pieces written near the end of his life: the Prelude, Chorale and Fugue for piano, one violin sonata, one symphony, three symphonic poems, and the piano quintet heard tonight. Though he composed throughout his life, Franck’s earlier work was sporadic and hewed to hefty, laborious genres like oratorio and opera; few of these proved successful in their time and even fewer are performed today. Instead, most of Franck’s adolescent and midlife energies went towards piano-playing, organ performance, and teaching, to varying degrees of success. He was a precocious pianist, though he never attained the virtuoso fame and fortune his exploitative and over-ambitious father vainly desired. After quitting his disappointed father’s household and escaping the fruitless career path forced upon him, Franck’s lot improved considerably. Appointed organist at the newly-built Basilica of Saint Clotilde in Paris, he steadily built a reputation as one of the country’s great improvisers at the keyboard and a composer of organ music of the highest quality. Over the decades, as his talents were gradually recognized, a circle of highly devoted student composers (among them Ernest Chausson and Vincent d’Indy) grew around Franck, hanging on every word of “Père Franck” (Father Franck, as they adoringly called him).

Only then, in the autumn of his life, did Franck finally realize his potential as a composer, developing a distinctive and highly expressive Romantic voice which struck an effective balance between the modernist chromaticism of Lizst and Wagner and older Classical traditions of counterpoint and form. Musical seeds planted in the basilica with his renowned organ improvisations, after germinating for decades, finally blossomed into a full-fledged style. Typically, the architecture of his music is cyclical: Recurring or related themes link movements into a cohesive whole. The interplay between voices is intricate, and sudden modulations into harmonically distant fields are frequent, though surprisingly elegant.

The Piano Quintet in F minor is the earliest of Franck’s great successes, launching his belated career in composition and winning over the public at its first performance (though, famously, not winning over Saint-Saëns, who stormed offstage after premiering the piano part). All the Franck hallmarks are here in spades. The second theme of the Allegro (that’s the fast part of the first movement, after the no-nonsense slow introduction) reappears at momentous points of the other two movements, giving a cyclical unity to the design of the whole. The harmony is richly, vibrantly chromatic and constant modulations give the impression that the whole scene is viewed through a continually-rotating prism. And that scene is intensely, urgently emotional, from the sprawling molto sentimento middle movement through the fretful-turned-fiery Allegro non troppo finale.

About the Artists

Called “dashing and extraordinary” by The Strad Magazine, the Apple Hill String Quartet are the Artistic Directors and resident musicians at the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music, winner of the CMAcclaim award from Chamber Music America. The Quartet serves as the Music Directors for Apple Hill’s Summer Chamber Music Workshop in Nelson, New Hampshire, cultivating connection and understanding among people of diverse backgrounds, cultures, experience levels and ages through music performance and education centered around the values of acceptance, inclusivity, creative expression and encouragement.

During the regular concert season, the Quartet performs concerts and conducts residencies locally in New Hampshire, nationally in major US cities, and internationally around the globe—in venues as diverse as the Curtis Institute of Music, Oberlin Conservatory, University of Michigan, the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College, Zipper Hall in Los Angeles, the Moscow Conservatory, the Ketermaya refugee camp outside of Beirut, Lebanon, the Conservatorio National de Musica in Lima, Peru and the Gitameit School of Music in Yangon, Myanmar.

Each of the Quartet’s concert programs reflects the diversity of Apple Hill: pieces amplifying new voices, views and backgrounds in classical music; compositions from places representing the Quartet’s global travels and the summer workshop community; and music from the historic canon and new commissions, especially from renowned alumni.

The Quartet has collaborated with members of the Brentano String Quartet, Silk Road Ensemble, Dorian Wind Quintet, Hirsch-Pinkas Piano Duo, New York Philharmonic and Community MusicWorks in Providence, Rhode Island. Members of the Quartet have received degrees from Oberlin Conservatory, the Juilliard School, Peabody Conservatory, New England Conservatory of Music, Manhattan School of Music, SUNY Stonybrook and a Fulbright Fellowship to London, England.

Called “first-rate” by the Boston Globe, Elise Kuder is the first violinist of the Apple Hill String Quartet and a Co-Artistic Director of the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music where she has been a resident musician since 1998. With Apple Hill, Elise has performed and taught in venues as diverse as the Curtis Institute of Music, Moscow Conservatory, Boston Conservatory at Berklee, Zipper Hall at the Colburn School in Los Angeles, the Institutes of Music in Damascus and Alleppo, Gitameit Music Institute in Burma, the Conservatorio Nacional de Musica in Lima, Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Dallas, the Royal Irish Academy of Music, the Ketermaya refugee camp outside of Beirut and the General Store in Harrisville, New Hampshire. With the Apple Hill String Quartet, described as “dashing and extraordinary” by The Strad Magazine, recent studio recordings include a premiere of Dana Lyn’s Suite for Fiddler and String Quartet, a revival of Ahmed Adnan Saygun’s String Quartet No. 1, and transcriptions of Purcell Fantasias. Elise serves as a Music Director for Apple Hill’s Summer Chamber Music Workshop. Elise is a graduate of Oberlin Conservatory and The Juilliard School where she studied with Marilyn McDonald and Joel Smirnoff. She attended the Tanglewood Music Center where she won the Kohn Award for outstanding musicianship and served as concertmaster of the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra under conductors Robert Spano and Bernard Haitink. As a Fulbright Scholar, Elise studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, England with David Takeno. In her spare time away from Apple Hill, she has performed at the Alhambra Ballroom in Harlem with disco legends Patrick Adams, Black Ivory and Donna McGhee and teaches violin in the Monadnock region of New Hampshire. Her students have gone on to attend Walnut Hill School for the Arts and Boston Conservatory at Berklee, been selected as concertmaster of the Middle School Honors Performance Series at Carnegie Hall, participated in the New Hampshire All State Orchestra, and learned Bach’s Solo Sonatas and Partitas at the age of 82.

Joining the Apple Hill String Quartet in 2020, Jesse MacDonald has participated and placed in festivals and competitions in the Northwest and Northeast regions of the United States. He first attended Apple Hill’s Young Artist Fellowship Program in 2014 as violinist in the Tempest String Quartet, and again in the summers of 2016 and 2018 as the teaching assistant for violin. He previously performed with New York City’s Luminaria String Quartet and Boston’s Emma String Quartet in performances at NEC’s Jordan Hall, the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Metropolitan Museum in New York City and throughout the New England area. He was also the lead fiddle player for the Broken String Band, a contra dance and swing band based out of Bozeman, Montana, for 10 years. He is currently a core member of Palaver Strings (Portland, Maine) and the Cape Cod Chamber Orchestra, and has played all over the East Coast with groups such as the Dessoff Choirs with Dr. Malcolm Merriweather, Bergen Symphony, Camerata New York, and with Off-Broadway theaters such as the Company Theatre in Norwell, Massachusetts , and the Seacoast Repertory Theater in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Jesse received his Bachelors degree at the New England Conservatory of Music, studying with Masuko Ushioda and Joanna Kurkowicz, and was awarded the Rachmael Weinstock Scholarship for Violin and Hugo Kortschak Award for Chamber Music from the Manhattan School of Music where he received his Masters degree, studying violin with Mark Steinberg.

Mike Kelley, Apple Hill String Quartet violist and Co-Artistic Director at the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music, graduated from The Walnut Hill School for the Arts and has received degrees from Oberlin Conservatory and The Juilliard School. His teachers have included Leonard Matczynski, Jeffrey Irvine and Karen Tuttle. A Primrose International Viola Competition finalist at the age of 18, Mike joined the resident ensemble of the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music three years later and has been performing and touring internationally with the group for over 20 years. He is the Music Director and Coordinator of Apple Hill’s Summer Chamber Music Workshop where he directs sessions, performs concerts and coaches chamber music throughout the summer in New Hampshire. An active composer, Mike has been a Teaching Fellow in Electronic Music at Juilliard, and a guest lecturer at Harvard on the subject of electronic dance music. Under a pop-disco alias, he has performed worldwide in clubs such as Webster Hall (NYC), the O2 (London), and Berghain (Berlin), and has written and produced music for many pop acts, including Metro Area, Caribou, Madonna and Pharrell. His albums have been selected for the “best of the decade” lists of music magazines Stylus and Fact, and have been highly recommended by Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork and the Guardian.

Rupert Thompson, cellist with the Apple Hill String Quartet and Co-Artistic Director at the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music, has been a resident member of Apple Hill since 1997. Making his solo debut with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra at the age of 18, Rupert has studied with Mihaly Virizlay and Timothy Eddy. Holding degrees from the Peabody Institute (BM) in Baltimore MD and SUNY Stony Brook of New York (MM and DMA), Rupert has received a career grant from the Concert Artist Guild, as well as the C.D. Jackson Memorial Award of Merit from the Tanglewood Music Center. Live radio broadcasts of his solo engagements include WFMT of Chicago and WQXR in New York City. In addition to his active Apple Hill concert and teaching schedule with such notable institutions as the Moscow Conservatory, Williams College, the Curtis Institute, Dartmouth College, UCLA, the Yerevan State Conservatory and the Boston Conservatory at Berklee, Rupert is also a photographer, a screen writer, and served as film composer for the award-winning movie Sensation of Sight which featured Oscar-nominated actor David Strathairn.

Following her London debut at Wigmore Hall, Israeli-born pianist Sally Pinkas has garnered universal praise as an eloquent and ardent performer. Among highlights are appearances with the Boston Pops, the Aspen Philharmonia and New York’s Jupiter Symphony, and at the festivals of Marlboro, Rockport (USA), Pontlevoy (France), Havana (Cuba) and HCMC Conservatory (Vietnam). A first-ever performance of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto in Bandung (Indonesia’s second largest city), premieres of George Rochberg’s monumental Circles of Fire for two pianos in Russia, Israel and Nigeria, and a revival of rarely-heard 19th-century Filipino Salon Music in its birth city Manila, all exemplify Pinkas’ wide-ranging repertoire. Through her travel she shares it generously with enthusiastic audiences and young pianists.

Equally at home in a recording studio, Sally’s discography features works by Mozart, Schumann, Fauré, Debussy, Gaubert, Martinu, Rochberg, Shapiro, Pinkham and Wolff, released on the MSR, Centaur, Naxos, Toccata Classics and Mode labels. Her most recent CD release of Sonatas by Shostakovich and Bridge was hailed as “…A mandatory purchase for all pianophiles: two major works, in performance of utter power…ideal melding of strength and emotional pliancy…” by Fanfare Magazine. A CD featuring Piano Quintets by Miguel del Aguila (with Cuarteto Latinoamericano) is forthcoming on Urtext
Digital Classics.

Pinkas tours regularly as member of Ensemble Schumann and the Hirsch-Pinkas Duo (with her husband, pianist Evan Hirsch), and collaborates frequently with the Adaskin Trio, the Apple Hill String Quartet and Cuarteto Latinoamericano. Recent travels took her to Madrid and Barcelona, where she presented solo recitals, and to Rio de Janeiro, where the Hirsch-Pinkas Duo made its Brazil debut in the famed Cecília Meireles Hall. She will be returning to China with Ensemble Schumann in 2023.

Pinkas holds performance degrees from Indiana University and the New England Conservatory, and a PhD in Composition from Brandeis University. Her principal teachers were Russell Sherman, George Sebok, Luise Vosgerchian and Genia Bar-Niv (piano), Sergiu Natra (composition), and Robert Koff (chamber music). Pianist-in-residence at the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College, she is Professor of Music at Dartmouth’s Music Department.

Apple Hill is supported in part by grants from the U.S. Small Business Administration, New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, Cheshire County of New Hampshire, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Connecting Artists to the Community

A conversation with the artists follows the performance. The quartet will also visit the Upper Valley Music Center class “Preparing to Hear Master Works,” and will perform a community concert at West Claremont Center for Music and the Arts on Thursday, November 10 at 7 pm.

“dashing and extraordinary”
The Strad Magazine

Apple Hill String Quartet

Apple Hill at the Hop Known for their commitment to diversity, the New Hampshire-based quartet injects every program with new voices, views and backgrounds. They are also a strong testament to our...

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