Axiom Quartet, known for playing Dua Lipa and Taylor Swift, to honor Polish music
Young musicians looking to connect with like-minded potential colleagues could do much worse than one of the giant wedding expos at the George R. Brown convention center. It was there, among “10,000 wedding dresses” and “every entertainment option you could possibly imagine,” reflects cellist Patrick Doyle, that Axiom Quartet took root.
“We knew of one another because we kind of belong to the same environment of musicians,” adds first violinist Dominika Dancewicz, also noting she and Doyle’s connection through Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. “The world of musicians is fairly small, and inevitably, you meet doing different jobs. It was a unifying factor.”
Also featuring violinist Maxine Kuo and violist Katie Carrington, Axiom launched its 10th season in September with an anniversary concert featuring Haydn, Beethoven and Shostakovich. Sunday brings “The Complexity of Simplicity,” a program of Polish and Polishborn composers at Holocaust Museum Houston. But the quartet also gigs at more unusual venues.
Airports, for one. Axiom is part of Harmony in the Air, a program that places small classical and jazz ensembles at Hobby and Bush airports, helping to introduce the city’s arts scene to concourse-bound travelers. “It’s hilarious, because people often tell us they were excited that their flight got delayed when they hear us at the airport,” Doyle says. “I’m happy and sad for them at the same time.”
Although they have free rein regarding their airport repertoire, the scene is quite different at the local pizzerias and coffeehouses in Axiom’s Jukebox Series, for which the group circulates a list of some 500 pop songs to their audience. It could be anything from the Eagles to Dua Lipa, but “Bohemian Rhapsody” and David Bowie’s “Fame” are perennial favorites. (“The Taylor Swift songs are surprisingly satisfying, always fun,” notes Doyle.) The next Jukebox show will be 3 p.m. Nov. 13 at Doshi House, located in the area between Third Ward and Midtown.
“Our interests are very wide, and we have never shied from looking into repertoire that’s not necessarily mainstream or wellknown, although we don’t try to avoid it either,” says Dancewicz.
Axiom’s goal with “The Complexity of Simplicity” is to elevate the profiles of the composers Mieczysław Weinberg, Karol Szymanowski and Mark Nowakowski. Co-presented by the Polish Consulate of Houston, the concert represents an effort to show a different side of Polish culture than the rustic revelry of Houston’s popular Polish Festival, explains the Polishborn Dancewicz.
A close friend of Shostakovich’s, Weinberg’s name may ring a few bells among local opera fans, thanks to 1968’s Auschwitz-set “The Passengers,” for which Houston Grand Opera did the U.S. premiere in January 2014. Although his chamber music is little known in this country, Dancewicz praises the sparse yet lyrical qualities of his String Quartet No. 5.
“It can be very deep and compelling; and yet the depth and sort of stillness is often juxtaposed with extreme virtuosity and extreme agitation,” she says. “It’s a very unique, extremely compelling style where not a single note is placed where it shouldn’t be. I personally enjoy it very much.”
Szymanowski, Dancewicz explains, is probably the bestknown Polish composer outside of Chopin; his String Quartet No. 2 is a later work (he died in 1937) that contains elements of atonalism and folk music from the Polish highlands. For the Nowakowski, a professor of music at Kent State University, time constraints will limit Axiom to the second movement of his String Quartet No. 1 (“Songs of Forgiveness”), which stems from the composer’s reflections on World War II.
“It came from his personal experience as well as a more global experience and fascination of the culture of celebrating death, and death as being part of what a human life cycle is,” Dancewicz. “So a little bit more philosophical, but I felt like this work can be a good sort of break between the two strong personalities of Weinberg and Szymanowski.”
Wide-ranging as their repertoire can be, the Axiom members are endlessly fascinated by perhaps classical music’s most elemental form: the simple string quartet. Whether the sparkling efforts of Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven’s era-blurring final quartets, or contemporary examples by Jessie Montgomery and Rice alum Caroline Shaw from recent Axiom concerts, the quartet keeps showing this quartet something new.
“It seems like every time a composer wants to do their absolute best, they dedicate it to the string quartet,” says Doyle. “So it’s always a challenge for us because there’s incredible music from the past that we love and want to play, but also, we want to help contribute to the music that people are going to be hearing in the future, so that there’s always going to be something new to listen to and keep the voice of the quartet vital.”