Calidore String Quartet to perform in Santa Fe
The Calidore String Quartet is an amalgam.
The group gestated at Los Angeles’ Colburn School of Music in 2010. The name is a reverential nod to California and the French word “doré,”meaning “golden.”
The group recently claimed its pot of gold.
The 2016 winners of the $100,000 University of Michigan M-Prize, the musicians will perform in Santa Fe’s St. Francis Auditorium on Sunday, March 5.
“I don’t know of another ensemble prize of that magnitude,” said Thomas O’Connor, Santa Fe Pro Musica director and conductor. “They also appear at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. They’re very attuned to the new generation of composers.”
Calidore features Jeffrey Myers and Ryan Meehan on violin, Jeremy Berry on viola and Estelle Choi on cello.
The musicians will perform a newly commissioned piece by the Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer Caroline Shaw.
“She’s the youngest ever (to win) in the music division,” O’Connor said.
Now a Princeton University doctoral candidate, Shaw has worked with both Kanye West and
the Baltimore Symphony.
“You’re looking at a composer who already has a distinct, unique voice,” O’Connor said. Her music is “sort of traditional and easy to follow with a sudden hodgepodge of rhythms. You get to the repeat, and it turns into chaos for just a bar.”
Santa Fe Pro Musica played Shaw’s “Entr’acte” last April.
The program will open with Mozart’s String Quartet in D Minor, K. 421/417b, better-known as one of the composer’s late Haydn quartets. The two composers worked together in Vienna.
The program is part of Santa Fe Pro Musica’s 35th anniversary season.
“We’re taking on a project of identifying women composers and performing their pieces on the main stage,” O’Connor said.