Much lauded Dover String Quartet at the AGH
If you play in a string quartet and your career trajectory needs some rocket fuel, just sweep the Banff International String Quartet Competition like the Dover String Quartet did in 2013.
To recap, not only did the Dovers — violinists Joel Link and Bryan Lee, violist Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt, and cellist Camden Shaw — walk away from Banff with the RBC Awards First Prize package comprised of $25,000, a three-year career development program including Banff Centre residencies, a CD produced and recorded by the Centre’s audio department, PR assistance, four custom-made Francois Malo bows, concert tours in North America and Europe, but they also took home the Esterhazy Foundation Prize consisting of a recital in Esterhazy Palace in Eisenstadt, Austria, and a €2,000 artist fee and travel expenses. In addition, the foursome collected the $3,000 Székely Prize for best performance of a Schubert quartet, the $3,000 R.S. Williams & Sons Haydn Prize for best performance of a Haydn quartet, and the $2,000 Canadian Commission Prize for best performance of Vivian Fung’s “String Quartet no. 3.”
And their Banff triumph wasn’t even the first taste of victory for the Dovers, who originally formed in 2008 as the Old City String Quartet while at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. (Their name change was a tip of the hat to “Dover Beach,” a 1931 composition for voice and string quartet by Curtis alumnus Samuel Barber.) They snagged the grand prize and gold medal in the senior strings category at the 2010 Fischoff competition in South Bend, Indiana.
Since then, the Dovers have amassed even more awards including the Hunt Family Award and the Avery Fisher Career Grant. To date, they’ve three recording projects under their belt. Their first, a reading of Debussy’s lone quartet and Mendelssohn’s “Second Quartet,” was made during their time at Curtis by unipheye.com. The other two were for the Cedille label, an all-Mozart disc with Michael Tree, erstwhile violist of the Guarneri String Quartet (disbanded 2009), and their Banff effort, “Voices of Defiance: 1943, 1944, 1945” which was released last October. In 2015, they were appointed quartet-in-residence at the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern U, a three-year position.
Critics have fallen all over themselves in praising the Dovers, the Chicago Tribune’s John von Rhein praising the Dovers’ “expert musicianship, razor-sharp ensemble, deep musical feeling, and a palpable commitment to communication.”
During the 2017-18 season, the Dovers will give more than 100 concerts. By the time you’ve read this column, they’ll have played this week in Nyon, Geneva, Cologne, and Amsterdam. On the 21st they’re back in Carnegie Hall with violinist Janine Jansen and pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet in Chausson’s “Concert for Violin, Piano and String Quartet.” On the 26th they’re in Evanston, Illinois. Then on Saturday, Jan. 27, at 2 p.m., they drop by the Joey and Toby Tanenbaum Pavilion in the Art Gallery of Hamilton, 123 King St. W., for a Chamber Music Hamilton concert.
The Dovers will open their CMH concert with the first cut from their “Voices of Defiance” CD, Viktor Ullmann’s “String Quartet no. 3” a single-movement work written in the Theresienstadt (Terezin) concentration camp in 1943, one year before the composer perished in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Following Ullmann’s 14-minute masterpiece will be Robert Schumann’s “String Quartet no. 2” op. 41 no. 2 dating from 1842. After intermission, it’s the richly expressive, single-movement, quasi-symphonic “String Quartet no. 2” from 1915 by Alexander Zemlinsky, who, incidentally, as music director of the Deutsches Landestheater in Prague hired Ullmann as chorus master in 1921, promoting him two years later to Kapellmeister.
There are still some tickets left for the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra under guest conductor Daniel Bartholomew-Poyser with Cirque de la Symphonie at FirstOntario Concert Hall this Saturday, Jan. 20, at 7:30 p.m. Call 905-5267756.
Leonard Turnevicius writes about classical music for The Hamilton Spectator. leonardturnevicius@gmail.com