BABEL:

The Calidore String Quartet contemplates the intersection of music and language on the ensemble’s second Signum Classics release, out October 23

The album includes the World Premiere recording of Three Essays by Caroline Shaw alongside Robert Schumann’s String Quartet No. 3 and String Quartet No. 9 by Dmitri Shostakovich

“The desire to explore the innate human drive for communication is the focus of BABEL. For this recording, our quartet gathered music which transmits ideas by imitating language; its rhythms, cadences and intentions. But it also explores what happens when music substitutes for language.  The result, a compilation of quartets by Schumann, Shostakovich and Caroline Shaw, demonstrates the visceral forms of expression that exist at the intersection of music and language.” Calidore String Quartet

NEW YORK, NY – September 29, 2020 – On October 23, Signum Classics will release BABEL, the Calidore String Quartet’s second album on the label, following 2018’s Resilience. The program of quartets by Schumann, Shostakovich and Caroline Shaw was conceived of in response to this unsettling time of polarization and lack of civility in public discourse.   The Quartet, who have been praised by The New York Times for “deep reserves of virtuosity and irrepressible dramatic instinct,” chose for this new album works that explore what the Quartet call “the visceral forms of expression at the convergence of music and language,” when music fills the void of forbidden speech and how it carries on when language has been exhausted. 

Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer Caroline Shaw’s collection of “Three Essays” addresses language’s power to stir emotion and spread information and ideas through written, spoken and digital forms.  The “First Essay: Nimrod” alludes to the biblical overseer of the construction of the Tower of Babel. The story, which seeks to explain the origin of the world’s languages, takes place following the Great Flood, when all of mankind speaks in a common tongue. Led by Nimrod, the human race seeks to construct a tower tall enough to reach heaven. In response, God confounds their speech, making the builders unintelligible to one another and halting the construction. Shaw writes that the “Second Essay: Echo” “touches on a number of references: the concept of the “echo chamber” that social media fosters in our political discourse; the “echo” function in the Hypertext Preprocessor programming language; and of course the effect of an echo.” The “Third Essay: Ruby” brings the philosophical and musical elements of the first two essays together, referring both to the programming language Ruby (developed in Japan in the mid-1990s), as well the simple beauty of the gem stone for which the language was named.”

 While Caroline Shaw provides a commentary on contemporary social dialogue, Dimitri Shostakovich illuminates music’s power to substitute for language as an act of defiance in Soviet Russia. On the exterior, the Ninth String Quartet is one of the most uplifting and optimistic in the cycle of Shostakovich’s fifteen quartets. Such an aesthetic put it clearly within the strict guidelines of the Soviet “Pure Music” regulations, making it immune to censorship. But beneath the music’s surface lies Shostakovich’s use of Jewish idioms, a symbol of his own defiance.

Robert Schumann found himself stifled in communicating his true feelings of love for the young Clara Wieck, a piano prodigy and famous concert artist whose father vehemently opposed their union. After years, the two finally wed, leading to one of Schumann’s most prolific periods. His Third String Quartet was completed within a couple of months and presented to Clara on her 23rd birthday. Through his music, Schumann expressed the relief of finally being able to freely communicate his love for Clara. The work is saturated with a two-note descending motive, known as Schumann’s "Clara Theme.”

“We hope this album will connect us with our audiences at a time when we are prevented from performing in-person concerts,” says Ryan Meehan of the Calidore String Quartet. “We are sending this recording out into the world as our own message of connection, in the language of music that conveys more than words ever can.”

BABEL

Robert Schumann: String Quartet No. 3, Op. 41

Caroline Shaw: Three Essays

Dmitri Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 9 in E-Flat Major, Op. 117

SIGCD650

ABOUT CALIDORE STRING QUARTET: Jeffrey Myers, violin Ryan Meehan, violin Jeremy Berry, viola Estelle Choi, cello

The Calidore String Quartet has been praised by The New York Times for its “deep reserves of virtuosity and irrepressible dramatic instinct.” The Los Angeles Times described the quartet as “astonishing” and praised its balance of “intellect and expression.” The Washington Post has said that “Four more individual musicians are unimaginable, yet these speak, breathe, think and feel as one.”

Recipient of a 2018 Avery Fisher Career Grant and a 2017 Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists, the Calidore String Quartet first made international headlines as winner of the $100,000 Grand Prize of the 2016 M-Prize Chamber Arts Competition. The quartet was the first North American ensemble to win the Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship, a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist, and is currently in residence with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s Bowers Program (formerly CMS Two).

In the 2019?20 season, the Calidore String Quartet celebrated both its tenth anniversary and the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth by presenting cycles of his string quartets at the Colburn School in Los Angeles, and the Universities of Buffalo, Toronto, and Delaware. Additionally, the Calidore premiered a new work by composer Anna Clyne inspired by Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge and commissioned by Music Accord in performances at Lincoln Center, Princeton University, Penn State University, Caramoor, San Francisco Performances, and Boston’s Celebrity Series. The quartet also made its debut at Strathmore and with Kansas City’s Friends of Chamber Music. In Europe, the Calidore performed in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Spain, and Switzerland. The quartet continues to collaborate with artists including pianists Marc-André Hamelin, Pavel Kolesnikov and Henry Kramer, violists Lawrence Power and Matthew Lipman, cellist Clive Greensmith, bassist Xavier Foley, guitarist Sharon Isbin, and oboist Cristina Gómez Godoy.

Highlights of recent seasons have included performances in major venues throughout North America, Europe, and Asia including Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall, the Kennedy Center, Konzerthaus Berlin, Brussels’s BOZAR, Cologne Philharmonie, Seoul’s Kumho Art Hall, and at significant festivals including the BBC Proms, Verbier, Ravinia, Mostly Mozart, Music@Menlo, Rheingau, East Neuk, and Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

On the Calidore String Quartet’s 2018 Signum release, Resilience, the quartet “presents an impressive sense of ensemble” in a “cleverly devised selection of quartets” (Strad) by Mendelssohn, Prokofiev, Janácek, and Golijov. The Calidore’s other commercial recordings include two albums recorded live in concert at the Music@Menlo Festival; Serenade, featuring music for string quartet from the Great War by Hindemith, Milhaud, Stravinsky, Ernst Toch, and Jacques de la Presle on the French label Editions Hortus; and their 2015 debut recording of quartets by Mendelssohn and Haydn, which prompted Gramophone to call the Calidore String Quartet “the epitome of confidence and finesse.” The Calidore’s members were featured as Young Artists in Residence on American Public Media’s Performance Today, and their performances have been featured in an NPR Tiny Desk Concert and on the BBC, the CBC, SiriusXM Satellite Radio, Korean Broadcasting System, Bayerischer Rundfunk (Munich), Norddeutscher Rundfunk (Hamburg), and on German national television as part of a documentary produced by ARD public broadcasting.

The Calidore has given world premieres of works by Caroline Shaw, Hannah Lash, Mark-Anthony Turnage, and Benjamin Dean Taylor. Its collaborations with esteemed artists and ensembles include Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Joshua Bell, David Shifrin, Inon Barnatan, Paul Coletti, David Finckel, Wu Han, Paul Neubauer, Ronald Leonard, and Paul Watkins among others. The Calidore has collaborated and studied closely with the Emerson Quartet and Quatuor Ébène, and has also studied with David Finckel, Andre Roy, Arnold Steinhardt, Günter Pichler, Guillaume Sutre, Paul Coletti, and Ronald Leonard, among others.

As a passionate supporter of music education, the Calidore String Quartet is committed to mentoring and educating young musicians, students, and audiences. The Calidore serves as Quartet-in-Residence at the University of Delaware and the University of Toronto. It has conducted master classes and residencies at Princeton, Stanford, the University of Michigan, the Colburn School, Stony Brook University, UCLA, and Mercer University.

The Calidore String Quartet was founded at the Colburn School in Los Angeles in 2010. Within two years, the quartet won grand prizes in virtually all the major US chamber music competitions, including the Fischoff, Coleman, Chesapeake, and Yellow Springs competitions, and it captured top prizes at the 2012 ARD International Music Competition in Munich and the International Chamber Music Competition Hamburg. An amalgamation of “California” and “doré” (French for “golden”), the ensemble’s name represents its reverence for the diversity of culture and the strong support it received from its original home: Los Angeles, California, the “golden state.”

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Journalists and Program Directors: To audition the recording for review or radio airplay, please contact:
Rebecca Davis
Rebecca Davis Public Relations
Rebecca@rebeccadavispr.com
347-432-8832