Pre-season Salon Concert Fundraiser
The Miró Quartet
One performance only! Tuesday, OCTOBER 3, 2023 | 7 pm
(Doors open at 6:30 pm)
The Miró Quartet returns to Salon Concerts in October to play a “Beethoven jukebox” with insights and anecdotes about the pieces. Enjoy fine wines, delicious food and conversation.
Limited seating. Beautiful surroundings.
artists:
Daniel Ching and William Fedkenheuer, Violins; John Largess, Viola; Joshua Gindele, Cello
Program:
The Miró Quartet loves making music at Salon Concerts, where they can be in the living room of a lovely house, playing for a small group of music lovers. For this special fundraising event to help support Salon Concerts, they came up with the unique idea of playing a “Beethoven jukebox” with insights and anecdotes about the pieces. This 75 minute program will consist of a sampling of movements from the Early, Middle and Late Quartets and culminate in a performance of Beethoven’s groundbreaking tour- de-force for the string quartet: the Great Fugue. Members of the quartet will speak throughout the program sharing with the audience how Beethoven’s hopes, dreams and life challenges shaped and inspired this intimate and transformative music.
The repertoire will be selections from the following:
Op.18 No.1
Op.18 No.3
Op. 59 No.1
…and Opuses 74, 127, 131, 133.
How’s that for a jukebox?!
This event preceding our regular season will help assure the future of Salon Concerts.Your support helps us to keep our excellent artists creating, employed, and sharing their gifts with the community.
THE MIRÓ QUARTET
The Miró Quartet is one of America’s most celebrated and dedicated string quartets, having been labeled by The New Yorker as “furiously committed” and noted by the Cleveland Plain-Dealer for their “exceptional tonal focus and interpretive intensity.” For the past twenty years they have performed throughout the world on the most prestigious concert stages, earning accolades from passionate critics and audiences alike. Based in Austin, TX, and thriving on the area’s storied music scene, the Miró takes pride in finding new ways to communicate with audiences of all backgrounds while cultivating the longstanding tradition of chamber music.
Highlights of recent seasons include a highly anticipated and sold-out return to Carnegie Hall to perform Beethoven’s Opus 59 quartets; a performance at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center as part of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s inaugural residency; the world premiere of a new concerto for string quartet and orchestra by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Kevin Puts; performances of the complete Beethoven Cycle at the Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival and at Tokyo’s Suntory Hall; and debuts in 2014-15 in Korea, Singapore, and at the Hong Kong International Chamber Music Festival.
The Quartet’s 2016-17 season featured collaborations with David Shifrin, Martin Beaver, Clive Greensmith, Andre Watts, and Wu Han; a performance of the complete Beethoven cycle in just nine days for Chamber Music Tulsa; and a much-anticipated return to Carnegie Hall. During its 2015-16 season, the Quartet returned to the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, performing Beethoven in Alice Tully Hall and the complete cycle of Ginastera’s quartets at the Rose Studio; and performed a late-Schubert quartet cycle for the prestigious Slee Series in Buffalo, NY.
A favorite of summer chamber music festivals, the Miró Quartet has recently performed at La Jolla Music Society’s SummerFest, Chamber Music Northwest, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, OK Mozart, and Music@Menlo. The Miró regularly collaborates with pianist Jon Kimura Parker, percussionist Colin Currie, and mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke.
Formed in 1995, the Miró Quartet was awarded first prize at several national and international competitions including the Banff International String Quartet Competition and the Naumburg Chamber Music Competition. Deeply committed to music education, members of the Quartet have given master classes at universities and conservatories throughout the world, and since 2003 the Miró has served as the quartet-in-residence at the University of Texas at Austin Sarah and Ernest Butler School of Music. In 2005, the Quartet became the first ensemble ever to be awarded the coveted Avery Fisher Career Grant.
Having released nine celebrated recordings, the Miró recently produced an Emmy Award- winning multimedia project titled Transcendence. A work with visual and audio elements available on live stream, CD, and Blu-ray, Transcendence encompasses philanthropy and documentary filmmaking and is centered around a performance of Franz Schubert’s Quartet in G major on rare Stradivarius instruments. The Miró records independently and makes its music available on a global scale through Apple Music, Amazon, Spotify, Pandora, and YouTube.
The Miró Quartet took its name and its inspiration from the Spanish artist Joan Miró, whose Surrealist works — with subject matter drawn from the realm of memory, dreams, and imaginative fantasy — are some of the most groundbreaking, influential, and admired of the 20th century.