Blodgett Chamber Music Series presents Parker Quartet
Date and Time
Location
The Environment Forum
Harvard University Department of Music
About the Event
Parker Quartet and mezzo soprano Fleur Barron with poetry readings woven through the program by Arthur Sze and Victoria Chang. This program is tied together by themes of nature, ecopoetics, and heritage. At its center is a new composition for string quartet and mezzo soprano by composer Anthony Cheung, which draws inspiration from the poetry of Arthur Sze and Victoria Chang. With his poetry, Arthur Sze is associated with the ecopoetics movement, and much of Victoria Chang’s poetry is deeply influenced by the relationship to the natural environment. Their work combines aesthetics from traditional Asian poetic forms that are deeply linked to themes of the natural world, with contemporary resonances. The members of our quartet and mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron are primarily of Asian heritage, and it is deeply important to us to give voice to Asian artists, which we’re thrilled that the collaboration with Anthony, Arthur, and Victoria, does on so many levels. To further this tie within the program, the text of Der Einsame im Herbst from Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde is based on a poem by Tang Dynasty poet Qian Qi. Both the Mahler and the Brahms Im Herbst, which opens the program, use nature as a metaphor – autumn as the time preceding the eternal winter, so tie into the program in a poetic and emotional sense. Between the Brahms and Mahler is John Luther Adams’s Wind in High Places, which is a meditative experience of the instruments’ natural occurring harmonics and represents the idea of wind and its forces. This piece has been described as “delicately sparse and wonderfully poetic”, and Luther Adams is known for being an environmental activist by putting nature as the central inspiration for his life’s work as a composer. We bookend the concert with music of Brahms, closing with his quartet in B flat Major, which has such a wonderful feeling of what Brahms’s own relationship to nature might have been.
There will be a pre-concert discussion hosted by the Mahindra Humanities Center starting at 6:30pm.
This event is co-sponsored by the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability.
Program
Brahms: Im Herbst from Fünf Gesänge, Op. 104
John Luther Adams: The Wind in High Places
Anthony Cheung: a field remembers (World Premiere)
-Intermission-
Mahler: Der Einsame im Herbst from Das Lied von der Erde (arr. Cheung)
Brahms: String Quartet No. 3 in B-flat major, Op. 67
Parker Quartet
Daniel Chong, violin
Ken Hamao, violin
Jessica Bodner, viola
Kee-Hyun Kim, cello