Chamber Music Kelowna season wraps up with Isidore String Quartet
Presenting its final concert of the 23/24 season on Friday, Chamber Music Kelowna hosted the Isidore String Quartet in a stirring and well-curated performance. Winners of the 2022 Banff International String Quartet Competition, the NYC- based quartet has garnered much acclaim and toured throughout North America and Europe.
The concert began in austerity and reverence, with four selections from the Art of Fugue, Johann Sebastian Bach’s final work. As the quartet’s violist, Devin Moore, elucidated in the program notes, every rehearsal and sound check of the Isidore Quartet begins with Bach: “Bach, for the ISQ, is the ground on which we explore endless possibilities, challenge worldly perceptions, and flourish as one instrument, one voice, one being.”
Devin then spoke eloquently to introduce the following two pieces, both contemporary. He described their overall performance concept as an “old-world influenced fantasy program” with four tiers/pieces in its unfolding.
The next work, “umbra,” by the Iranian-American composer Aida Shirazi, offered slow spectral and timbral shifts depicting shadow qualities, recalling the recent solar eclipse. This was followed by a more theatrical piece by the Sri Lankan-born Canadian Dinuk Wijeratne,“The Disappearance of Lisa Gherardini.” First portraying the painting of the Mona Lisa in 1503 by Leonardo da Vinci through a lush cello solo and brushstrokes in the violins, the music then jumps centuries to depict the spectacular heist of the painting from the Louvre museum in 1911. After scuttling, sirens, and a chase, the music returns to repose, as da Vinci’s painting of Mona Lisa did as well, two years after it was stolen.
The Isidore Quartet capped off their innovative program with the Quartet in E-flat Major, op. 44, no. 3 by Felix Mendelssohn. Showcasing the group’s refinement, warmth, and imaginative phasing, each movement came to life—the driving first movement, with a recurring motif of four sixteenth-notes; the hushed and magical Scherzo; a lush slow movement; and the Finale, marked con fuoco (with fire). On several occasions, Mendelssohn teases us with contrapuntal writing, almost as if to begin a fugue, recalling the revered J.S. Bach and bringing the Isidore’s program full circle. Martin Krátký is a cellist and educator based in the Interior of British Columbia.