Falls Village, Conn. — Everyone knows there is nothing new under the sun. But the Cramer Quartet really puts that assumption to the test—unless you can name even one other string quartet that uses historic instruments to perform newly commissioned works inspired by music from the 18th century. So even when they play pieces from the standard repertoire, their sound is anything but standard. They sound more like the music 18th-century audiences heard in the salons of Vienna.
The Cramer musicians, violinists Jessica Park and Chiara Fasani Stauffer, violist Keats Dieffenbach, and cellist Shirley Hunt, will arrive early at Music Mountain Sunday, August 14 to discuss their work prior to their 3 p.m. performance. They will be joined by American composer Alexandra du Bois, whose String Quartet #6 will receive its world premiere during the 3 p.m. performance.
The Cramer must be the most ambitious string quartet on Earth. This ensemble intends to do no less than “re-balance” the string quartet canon. And they’re off to a very good start. As persons of color, women, non-binary/transmasc, and LGBTQ+, their mission is all about advancing cultural equity in classical music while championing historically informed performance practices.
Joseph Haydn composed 68 string quartets, and the Cramer Quartet loves them all. They love Haydn’s music so much that they have undertaken “Haydn: Dialogues“, a multi-year project combining all 68 of Haydn’s quartets with 16 commissioned new works from composers of marginalized identities. Each composer creates a response for historical instruments to one of Haydn’s 16 opuses. These performances will occur over the course of the next ten seasons, concluding in 2032, the 300th anniversary of Haydn’s birth. The group’s August 14 performance inaugurates the series. Next season, the quartet will premiere a new work by composer inti figgis-vizueta alongside all three of the Haydn Op. 71 string quartets.
Here is Sunday’s program:
HAYDN String Quartet in C Major, Op. 20 #2
DU BOIS String Quartet #6 (in response to Haydn’s Opus 20 quartets)
HAYDN String Quartet in G Major, Op. 76 #1
Based in New York City, the Cramer Quartet takes its name from violinist Wilhelm Cramer, London’s first major string quartet leader. The players use historical bows patterned after Cramer’s own design.
The Los Angeles Times calls Alexandra Du Bois “one of America’s most promising young composers.” And what the New York Times wrote about her suggests she is an ideal match for the Cramer Quartet: “Romantics might have deemed this sturm und drang; nowadays, to borrow a term from rock, it was pure emo.” “Most important,” wrote the Huffington Post, “Alexandra du Bois writes music with beauty and heart.”
With a historically informed performance approach rooted in the sound world of gut strings, the Cramer Quartet brings to Classical, early Romantic, and contemporary repertoire a palate of warm and transparent sonorities otherwise relegated to early music performance.
See the Cramer Quartet in Gordon Hall, Music Mountain, 225 Music Mountain Road, Falls Village, Conn., on August 14, at 3 p.m. Pre-concert talk at 1:30 p.m. Purchase tickets here.
