The Escher String Quartet has been a Festival audience favorite since 2008—when they first performed here—and last summer they pulled off a first in the Festival’s history by playing all six of Bartók’s physically, mentally, and emotionally demanding string quartets over the course of one three-hour-plus concert. Five months before that performance, they played the same marathon program at New York’s Lincoln Center, and, in a review, The New Yorker praised the Escher’s “near-miraculous control of pitch and coördination of rhythm” and “unerring balance of voices.”
That review spoke to the essence of the Escher’s music-making, as the group took their name and initial inspiration from the Dutch graphic artist M. C. Escher (1898–1972), whom they admired for what they called “his method of interplay between individual components that worked together to form a whole.”
This summer, the Escher brings that spirit of interplay back to the Festival with a noontime recital on Wednesday, August 6, that features 19th-century gems and a brand-new Festival-commissioned work that will be performed in its US premiere.
Kicking things off are the first two pieces—the sparkling Andante and Scherzo—of Mendelssohn’s Op. 81, a collection of four disparate (yet seamless) works that Mendelssohn’s publisher assembled and released posthumously following the composer’s untimely death in 1847 at the age of 38. Both the Andante and Scherzo date from Mendelssohn’s final year, and the Andante contains the only variations Mendelssohn ever wrote for a string quartet.
After the Mendelssohn, the Escher gives the first US performance of the String Quartet No. 4 by Julian Anderson, whose honors, as one of today’s leading composers, include winning the 2023 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition and being appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2021 for his services to music. Anderson’s String Quartet No. 4, which the Belcea Quartet premiered in Lisbon in 2024 before touring it around Europe, is a co-commission between the Festival and six international partners: the Portugal-based Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, London’s Wigmore Hall, the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Copenhagen’s Mogens Dahl Concert Hall, and Dublin’s National Concert Hall.
Closing out their program is a performance of Dvořák’s masterful, late-career Op. 105, which the Czech composer began while living in America—where, from 1892 to 1895, he served as the director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City—and which he completed after he returned to Prague.
The Escher makes one more Festival appearance this summer, on Sunday, August 10, when they join violinists Chad Hoopes and Ida Kavafian, violist Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt, and cellist Eric Kim for Enescu’s grand Octet—which, like the famous Octet composed by the previously mentioned Mendelssohn, dates to when Enescu was a teenager.
The members of the Escher String Quartet weren’t much older than teenagers themselves when they first came together in New York City in 2005. Over the past two decades, the ensemble—today made up of violinists Adam Barnett-Hart and Brendan Speltz, violist Pierre Lapointe, and cellist Brook Speltz (Brook and Brendan are brothers)—has won the Avery Fisher Career Grant and been named a BBC New Generation Artist, among other honors. They frequently perform with The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and they’ve appeared around the world at such prestigious venues as The Kennedy Center and Library of Congress in Washington, DC; the Harris Theater in Chicago; Wigmore Hall; Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw; Berlin’s Konzerthaus; London’s Kings Place; and Paris’s Auditorium du Louvre. Their acclaimed discography includes their two most-recent recordings, both of which were released during the 2022–23 season: Air in Motion, featuring string quartets by the American composer Pierre Jalbert, and Janáček and Haas, a collection of Janáček’s two string quartets and Haas’s Quartet No. 2. The Escher is joined on the latter work by percussionist Colin Currie, whom The Spectator called “the world’s finest and most daring percussionist” and whom you can see this summer when he makes his Festival debut on August 7 in our first-ever solo percussion recital.
The Escher has built a reputation for giving world-class performances that allow them to challenge and explore their artistic boundaries, but they’ve also devoted themselves to music education, having served on the faculties of Southern Methodist University and the University of Akron. Their most recent educational endeavor has been the creation of a non-profit organization called ESQYRE (the Escher String Quartet Youth Residency Education program), which gives students a robust educational experience through music instruction and performance.
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