Word: quartetting
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Last Friday the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, under the direction of Dr. James Yannatos, opened its 190th season with an admirably diverse and contemporary program: Hindemith's Symphonic Metamorphoses on the Themes of Carl Maria von Weber, the premiere of Yannatos Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra, performed by the Mendelssohn String Quartet, and Dvorak's Symphony No. 9 "From the New World...
...soloist of a concerto, the string quartet is a curious innovation, placing an entire choir of instruments against the orchestra. This form poses some practical problems: the challenge is making the soloists truly stand apart from the orchestral strings. The concerto traditionally accomplishes this in three ways: alternation of solo and orchestral passages; dynamic, registral, and rhythmic isolation; and use of the instrument's individual tone color. This last method, in the case of the string quartet, is the hardest: the quartet's tone color is easily blanketed by the larger orchestral strings. The genre of concerto depends upon contrast...
...allegro, adagio con moto, allegro giocoso), there was little sense of actual formal differentiation--partly due to the tempo changes within a given movement, partly to the overall consistency, almost to a fault, of the instrumental texture. The texture was dominated by the churning lines of the strings, the quartet often moving in the same manner but isolated registrally. Added to this was the occasional punctuation and melodic quote announced by the remaining choirs of the orchestra, nearly always regulated to a marginal role. The percussion, and occasionally the brass, were often the sole indicators of points of arrival...
...luck, they came to embody their tumultuous times, as we social commentators like to say: the McCarthy era, the end of enforced racial segregation, the street riots of the 1960s. But have you heard of the NEA Four? A generation from now, historians may see that hapless quartet as embodying the less than tumultuous times of the 1990s. For this is the era of tiny commotions...
Four fans of the Liverpudlian quartet formed the club last October...