Performance

Spring 2023

Apple Hill String Quartet

April 12, 2023

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

An eclectic array of classical works closes out the quartet's year-long residency.

22/23 Hop Presents

Apple Hill String Quartet Spring 2023

Inspired by Dartmouth's Mexican Repertoire Initiative, the evening begins with Sonoralia by Emmanuel Arias y Luna, a piece that will have you humming and dancing in your seat. Next, Silvestre Revueltas also incorporated Mexican folk tunes and rhythms in his music, but the sound world of his String Quartet No. 1 couldn't be more different from Arias y Luna. You'll want to experience this amazing pairing. The concert then travels ahead to the 20th century with Chinese American composer Thomas Oboe Lee's Morango... Almost a Tango and Japanese composer Sato Matsui's Amaterasu. The evening concludes with Joseph Haydn's String Quartet in E major, Op. 17/1.

Dr. Brian Messier, Director of Bands at Dartmouth College, will moderate a conversation with the quartet after the performance.

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, 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.

Program

The Project

Hopkins Center for the Arts
at Dartmouth

presents

Apple Hill String Quartet

Elise Kuder, violin
Jesse MacDonald, violin
Mike Kelley, viola
Matthew Smith, guest cellist

Wednesday, April 12, 7:30 pm • Church of Christ • Dartmouth College • 2023

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.

The Hop’s 2022-23 Season is supported, in part, by the New England Foundation for the Arts through the New England Arts Resilience Fund, part of the United States Regional Arts Resilience Fund, an initiative of the U.S. Regional Arts Organizations and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with major funding from the federal CARES Act and the American Rescue Plan Act from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Program
Approximate duration: 85 minutes including intermission

Sonoralia, Op. 3 “La Zacatecana” Emmanuel Arias y Luna (1935–)

I. Danza

II. Jarabe

Morango … almost a tango Thomas Oboe Lee (1945–)

String Quartet No. 1 Silvestre Revueltas (1899–1940)

I. Allegro energico

II. Vivo

“Amaterasu,” from Kagura for String Quartet Sato Matsui (1991–)

Intermission

String Quartet in E major, Op. 17, No. 1, Hob. III:25 Joseph Haydn (1732–1809)

I. Moderato

II. Menuetto—Trio

III. Adagio

IV. Presto

Program Notes

Emmanuel Arias y Luna
Sonoralia, Op. 3 “La Zacatecana”

Emmanuel Arias y Luna was born in Mexico City on May 16, 1935. He originally scored his Sonoralia for string orchestra in 1981, arranging the work for string quartet in 1994.

Even in his native Mexico, where his music enjoys more attention than in the United States, Emmanuel Arias y Luna may be better known as a pedagogue, conductor and violinist of the highest class than as a composer. He played in Mexico’s National Symphony Orchestra from 1955 (not long after the ensemble’s founding by Carlos Chávez) until 1983, when he turned towards teaching and conducting positions within the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes and began putting out his own music at a quicker pace. Continuing Chávez’s ideological and musical legacy, Arias y Luna’s music is nationalist and populist in idiom, informed by the lineages of popular, concert and traditional music in Mexico from the colonial era to the present. Not satisfied with merely historical study, Arias y Luna has moonlighted as an amateur folklorist, traveling into the field to research the living musical traditions of rural Mexico.

Arias y Luna’s most frequently performed work, the miniature string quartet Sonoralia (“La Zacatecana”), presents a bite-sized sampler of urban Mexican music as might have been heard in the salons and dance halls of the city of Zacatecas in the 19th and early 20th centuries, fluently arranged for strings.

First comes the danza habanera, a dance form descended from the 2/4 version of the Afro-Cuban contradanza that spread to continental Latin America early in the 19th century. The popularity of the habanera in Mexico has been traced to “La Paloma”, an 1860 parlor song by Spaniard Sebastian de Yradier; local composers like the Veracruzan Narciso Serradell soon took up the form, and the danza assumed a central position in the middle-class urban realm of late 19th-century cancion sentimental. Though traveling string ensembles took the danza into the Mexican countryside in the next century, for many Revolution-minded Mexicans the habanera remained an unsavory reminder of the Porfiriato period and its bourgeois sensibilities. The defining rhythm is the dotted bass line (you may recognize it from tango, which deploys the same pulse), here held down by the cello. Arias y Luna’s treatment of the danza expertly evokes the urbane Mexican salon: While the form is concise and the harmony straightforward, the violin melody is lyrical and passionate.

After the briefest pause, the quartet launches into a lively ABAB-form jarabe. A nimble 6/8 dance indigenous to Mexico, the jarabe proved an apt cultural emblem for nationalists seeking to define a distinct mestizo identity during the War of Independence and the Mexican Revolution. The jarabe tapatío (better known in English as the “Mexican hat dance”) from Jalisco, Mexico’s national dance, provides the most famous example of the form and its music. Arias y Luna’s jarabe here tempers the frisky syncopation of the groove with an almost Neoclassical restraint to the scoring, though the final whirls of the B tune permit some snazzy flourishes for the first violin.

Thomas Oboe Lee
Morango … almost a tango

Thomas Oboe Lee was born on September 5, 1945, in Beijing; today he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He composed Morango … Almost a Tango in 1983 for the Kronos Quartet, and it was premiered on July 21, 1983, by the Red Sneakers String Quartet in Cambridge. Below is the composer’s own note for the work.

Morango … almost a tango (1983) is about to become a teenager on March 16, 1996. Yikes!!! It is amazing that the work was conceived 12 years ago!!! Originally, it was just a 32-bar jazz tune I performed every Sunday night with the Moon Unit at the 1369 Jazz Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1980-1984. The string quartet version, although written for the Kronos Quartet, was premiered at “Concert X” by the Composers in Red Sneakers in Sanders Theater, Cambridge, Massachusetts, on July 21, 1983. The “Red Sneakers String Quartet” comprised of Thal Aylward, Melissa Howe, Frank Grimes and Sandy Kiefer. Richard Buell reported in the Boston Globe a few days later that the “doleful Morango … almost a tango got a lot of mileage out of a stubborn, almost unchanging cello line and the elaborations above it.”

The original program note read, “Last summer in Vermont I met Gustavo Moretto, an Argentine composer, who taught me the finer and more beautiful aspects of the tango. In my modest way, as someone looking in from the outside, I created Morango … almost a tango—a bastardized version of the ‘real thing.’ Morango … is also intrinsically connected to Kate Moran, a sometimes-painter…to whom it is dedicated. The work is played con sordino throughout. I hope the sirens next door don’t intrude too much. But then again, John Cage would be delighted.”

Silvestre Revueltas
String Quartet No. 1

Silvestre Revueltas was born in Santiago Papasquiaro, Durango, Mexico, on December 31, 1899, and died in Mexico City on October 5, 1940. He wrote his String Quartet No. 1 in 1930 while teaching and conducting at Carlos Chávez’s Conservatorio Nacional, where the work likely premiered. Revueltas dedicated the work to Chávez.

Following the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920, it was Silvestre Revueltas, along with his close colleague Carlos Chávez, who became the modernizing architects of musical life and institutions in Mexico. By the later 1930s, both composers embraced populist, nationalist styles as the proper sonic representation of modern Mexico, drawing from urban commercial music, folk tunes and Indigenous idioms, typically propelled by repetitive (often polyrhythmic) percussion grooves. Over the prior decade, though, Chávez, and particularly Revueltas, promoted more abstract and fiercely modernist techniques in pursuit of a revolutionary realism befitting the plight of the newly urbanized Mexican working class.

Revueltas’s First String Quartet, composed in 1930, exemplifies that earlier style while hinting at the direction his writing would soon turn. This is spiky, dissonant music, shifting abruptly and unpredictably between troubled moods and deploying themes that are nearly serialist—that is, making equal use of all 12 pitches of the chromatic scale. But in the most compelling passages the density abates, with dance-like grooves, idiomatic tunes, and simple chords that sound all the more meaningful juxtaposed with their knotty surroundings.

Both movements take an ABA form, in which the primary material is faster, more dissonant and more aggressive in character, while the middle sections feature slower tempos and more lyrical, melancholy themes. The central Adagio passage of the opening movement, with its yearning violin strains over anguished chromaticism in the accompaniment, is a remarkable feat of writing. Gradually, imperceptibly, its seeming atonality transmutes into pure E-minor diatonicism. Even more moving is the Andante in the midst of the second movement’s manic 3/8 dance. Here, the second violin (soon joined by the first in hollow perfect fourths) weeps a muted lament down the chromatic scale while the cello and viola pluck out a stony ostinato, completely impassive to the upper strings’ sorrow.

Sato Matsui
“Amaterasu,” from Kagura for String Quartet

Sato Matsui was born in Chitose, Japan, on January 4, 1991; today she lives in Paris. She wrote “Amaterasu” in 2022 as the first movement of her Kagura for String Quartet. Below is the composer’s own note for the work.

The origin of the Shinto religion in Japan extends beyond recorded history into the rich oral history of the mythic past. Rooted in the ancient practice of pagan nature-worship, Shinto teaches that supernatural spirits called kami are present all around us in organic and inorganic forms, both mortal and immortal, sometimes benevolent and at other times destructive.

Kagura, or “the divine entertainment,” is a ceremonial form of dance and music that evolved throughout mainland Japan over a millennium. Designed to welcome kami into the people’s midst, the form is loose and encompasses a wide breadth of expressivity depending on the deity to whom the ritual is dedicated.

Amaterasu the Sun Goddess is one of the most beloved and revered kami of the Shinto tradition, who brings about life, hope, future, and energy. The first movement evokes her generous and majestic presence through a slow kagura dance in fluid tempo.

Joseph Haydn
String Quartet in E major, Op. 17, No. 1, Hob. III:25

Joseph Haydn was born on March 31, 1732, in Rohrau, Austria, and died on May 31, 1809, in Vienna. He wrote his six Opus 17 string quartets in 1771.

In 1771, Haydn was in his 11th year of employment at the Esterházy court, the richest and most powerful among Hungarian nobility. Since his promotion to Kapellmeister in 1766, his compositional energies had largely been devoted to operas and sacred music, while his output of instrumental music slowed. Though fewer in number, Haydn’s instrumental works of the late 1760s and early 1770s demonstrate a flourishing of his style, with expanded forms, more passionate expression, and more daring writing—possibly stimulated by his vocal work. It was during this period that the string quartet, a genre Haydn himself established in the 1750s but hadn’t cultivated since, developed its fullest Classical expression in works such as the Op. 17, No. 1 heard tonight. Here is the quartet with its complete four-movement architecture, dramatic emotional range, and high-art aspirations, setting the standard for the next two centuries of the genre’s existence.

The opening Moderato begins modestly enough with a staid E-major primary theme whose restatement spins off into an unstable “expansion section”; characteristically for Haydn, there is no genuine second theme in this exposition. After a harmonically imaginative retransition to conclude the development, excited activity in the cello foretells surprises in the recapitulation of the primary theme. A sudden, striking dotted figure interrupts the false reprise, and we’re thrust into a dramatic passage of turbulent suspensions, capped by another dotted tattoo.

A cheery E-major minuet follows, with unison violins lending a fiddle-like rusticity to the opening strain, while the Trio reveals a starker, suspenseful, sparsely-textured E-minor realm. The Adagio third movement returns to E minor, offering the most expressive, dissonant music of the whole quartet before the spritely Presto speeds to the finish.

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’s 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.

Matthew Smith is a highly skilled cellist, celebrated for his expertise in chamber music and education. He has captivated audiences across the United States and Asia with his rich, emotive performances. As Co-Artistic Director of Palaver Strings, a musician-led chamber orchestra, Matthew has achieved remarkable milestones. His ensemble has been invited to perform at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C., served as the ensemble-in-residence at the Boston Center for the Arts, and at the Longy School of Music of Bard College. He has also collaborated with his duo partner, Peipei Song, in performances at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing and at the Tianjin Conservatory in China. In addition to his performing career, Matthew is an accomplished educator. He currently serves as the Managing Director of Education for Palaver Strings, where he has spearheaded the development and design of the Palaver Music Center in Portland, Maine. Matthew has also led the course “Music and Civic Engagement” at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the past two years. His talents as a teaching artist have been recognized through his appointment as a Music Educator and Teaching Artist Fellow by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, as well as his role as a Graduate Assistant at The Boston Conservatory. Matthew received his Master of Music degree from The Boston Conservatory at Berklee and his Bachelor of Music degree from Arizona State University.

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

This concert is part of Apple Hill’s year-long residency at the Hop. The program is, in part, inspired by the Hop’s ongoing Mexican Repertoire Initiative at Dartmouth. This spring, the quartet also takes part in a panel discussion at Tuck School of Business, where they share their non-hierarchical working model and discuss its importance for nontraditional career paths, as well as how new or forgotten voices connect and become integral to the classical music canon. Apple Hill will also conduct a school visit to bring chamber music to younger students.

“dashing and extraordinary”
The Strad Magazine

Apple Hill String Quartet

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