The Victoria Bach Festival is pleased to welcome Aeolus Quartet members Nick Tavani, Rachel Shapiro, Caitlin Lynch, and Alan Richardson back to South Texas. Tickets are going fast for the Saturday, June 2 concert at the Presidio La Bahía in Goliad and the Sunday, June 3 concert at The Sanctuary in Edna.
We caught up with cellist Alan Richardson to get his thoughts on the quartet’s concerts for the 2018 Victoria Bach Festival.
VBF: How did the Aeolus Quartet form, and what inspired the group’s name?
AR: The Aeolus Quartet formed while we were pursuing our undergraduate degrees at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Nick and I were roommates freshman year (back in 2005!) and started playing together in a quartet our first semester. Rachel, who we were both already good friends with, started playing with us the next year with a different violist, and our founding violist, Greg Luce, joined on in 2009, our last year of undergraduate work. Caitlin was ALSO a friend of ours from our undergraduate work, and we are ecstatic that she agreed to join the quartet when Greg stepped down in fall 2017. Aeolus is the keeper of the four winds in Greek mythology. We were taken with the idea of a single force or spirit (the quartet itself) directing and inspiring the individual members.
VBF: Tell us about the program you have prepared.
AR: We are VERY excited about the program we will be sharing with you all at the Victoria Bach Festival. The first two works are fantastic contemporary compositions, which I expect to be a big hit with the audience. Missy Mazzoli’s “Quartet for Queen Mab” is a mysterious and fanciful piece, in which it feels like the listener is being guided through a dream world. This is a work we are quite fond of and will appear on our upcoming album of American string quartets, recorded by Azica Records. The next piece, Osvaldo Golijov’s “Tenebrae,” is a heartrendingly beautiful piece from 2002 that we are particularly excited to perform at the Presidio La Bahía. I can’t say anything about the piece that tops the composer’s own words about it:
“I wrote Tenebrae as a consequence of witnessing two contrasting realities in a short period of time in September 2000. I was in Israel at the start of the new wave of violence that is still continuing today, and a week later I took my son to the new planetarium in New York, where we could see the Earth as a beautiful blue dot in space.
I wanted to write a piece that could be listened to from different perspectives. That is, if one chooses to listen to it “from afar,” the music would probably offer a “beautiful” surface but, from a metaphorically closer distance, one could hear that, beneath that surface, the music is full of pain. I lifted some of the haunting melismas from Couperin’s Troisieme Leçon de Tenebrae, using them as sources for loops, and wrote new interludes between them, always within a pulsating, vibrating, aerial texture.
The compositional challenge was to write music that would sound as an orbiting spaceship that never touches ground. After finishing the composition, I realized that Tenebrae could be heard as the slow, quiet reading of an illuminated medieval manuscript in which the appearances of the voice singing the letters of the Hebrew Alphabet (from Yod to Nun, as in Couperin) signal the beginning of new chapters, leading to the ending section, built around a single, repeated word: Jerusalem.”
Which brings us to the final work on the program, Beethoven’s monumental String Quartet in C-sharp minor, op 131. This late quartet is certainly one of the most significant achievements in the string quartet form—a seven movement work, where all movements are connected to one another, in which the seams between the movements are perhaps the most moving moments of the piece. The work starts off with a long, meditative fugue, and from there spins out into a joyful allegro, an almost comically brief recitative, an expansive and transformative theme and variations, an extremely comical presto, a poignant and melancholy aria, and a furious finale. For any first-time listeners, hearing this masterwork live should be an experience they won’t soon forget!
VBF: What was it like performing in the historic Presidio La Bahía in Goliad last year, and how will your performances in Goliad and Edna be different this year compared with last year?
AR: We loved playing in the Presidio La Bahía! We still talk about it as one of the most striking spaces where we have performed. Having played in the Presidio, we specifically selected a program that we think will come to life in the intimate, incredibly resonant space. The Golijov, in particular, is going to be fantastic there! And we’ve heard great things about The Sanctuary in Edna; it’s always interesting to perform in a new space and pick up on the energy of the room and the audience.
VBF: What do you hope the audience comes away with after listening to your performances at the Victoria Bach Festival?
AR: I think that one of the most amazing things about live music is that everyone’s experience can be different, and each member of the audience will walk away in a different emotional space than the person sitting next to him or her. As an audience member, what you bring with you is so integral to what you get out of a concert that we could never prescribe one particular take-away from our performances. If you come to a performance of Beethoven’s opus 131 after the birth of a new child, you will probably have a wildly different experience of the piece than someone who is grieving the loss of a loved one. That being said, we do hope that everyone enjoys the beauty of sound and the endless possibilities that come from four string instruments in conversation with one another!
VBF: During down time, what do members of the quartet like to do?
AR: Nick has a 2-month-old son, and Caitlin has a 3-year-old daughter, so I’m not sure either of them have down time! We all love hiking and spending time in nature. I personally live right next to two beautiful parks in NYC, where I love to go on runs and walks.
