Looking Skyward is an invitation to tilt your head up to the night sky and be astonished. With nothing but stars encompassing your view, do you become infinitesimal or voluminous? Does the darkness imbue a sense of wonder, or rather, provoke you to nervously quicken your pace? You may notice your other senses sharpening as sight retreats, amplifying, say, delicate claws skittering through dry leaves into a hair-raising chaos of percussion.
The music you will hear is intended to capture, just for a moment, the elusive and the fleeting – the abstract and the intangible. These are the thoughts that emerge at nightfall.
One of the most recognizable pieces in the chamber music literature, Claude Debussy’s String Quartet in G minor famously winds his iconic opening motive through the turbulent and toward the transcendent. This is a work actively separating itself from the Beethov-ian tradition, proposing instead a more fluid architecture and more brazen in its sensuality. Whether this is your first or your fifteenth encounter, the word “ravishing” is likely to be bouncing around your brain in the days to come.
Henri Dutilleux’s sound-painting of the crepuscular dark, Ainsi la nuit (“Thus the Night”) may see stages less often than its Debussy counterpart, but it is no less fascinating. Like Proust’s description of sense memory – the famed madeleine cookie – Dutilleux offers us hints or shards of his melodies and harmonies before ever stating them in full. It gives the impression of familiarity, but in a somewhat elusive and mysterious way that only becomes apparent after the fact. We’ve fallen helplessly in love with this quartet, and we can’t wait for you to, as well.
Speaking of elusive, we are pleased to share with you one of our most consequential and inspiring commissions to-date: Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s first string quartet, Enigma. Sliding between the realms of melody and noise, this introspective work lives at the border of light and dark, causing it to seem both colossal and microscopic at the same time. Be prepared to venture into previously untraveled corners of your mind…
PROGRAM
Claude Debussy – String Quartet in G minor (1893)
Henri Duttileux – Ainsi la nuit (1976)
Anna Thorvaldsdottir – Enigma (2019)
Spektral Quartet’s programming is supported by our members, our donors, and by the following foundations and organizations:
