Aizuri Quartet. June 23, 2016.

Richardson Auditorium, Princeton.  Balcony Center.

Quartet members: Miho Saegusa, violin; Ariana Kim, violin; Ayane Kozasa, viola; Karen Ouzounian, cello.

Program

String Quartet No. 6 in B-flat major, Op. 18 by Beethoven (1770-1827).

Blueprint by Caroline Shaw (b. 1982).

String Quartet No. 3 in A major, Op. 41, No. 3 by Schumann (1810-1856).

This was the first of the four chamber music concerts hosted by the Princeton University Summer Concerts organization.  As usual, it was David and Vivien who brought the series to our attention.  Since we just returned from Maine a couple of days ago, and had attended the Snug Harbor concert the day before, Anne decided to forego the event.  I was quite ready to go.

The quartet consists of four young women, and was formed in 2012.  David mentioned to me there was a recent change in membership as one of the violinists left for a solo career.  In any case, the violinists switch the first and second violin roles, with Saegusa playing the lead in Beethoven and Schumann, and Kim the Shaw piece.

Since I am not very good with chamber music, my reaction to the pieces was “that’s pretty good.”  Particularly so since I am writing this several days later, and had heard a second concert in the series just now, thus any specific recollections have been wiped clean.

A Princeton professor, Scott Burnham, introduced each of the three pieces.  His descriptions were simple enough, a few sentences about each of the movements, using familiar words and phrases like brilliant, emotion, gallop, and descending fifth.  While they helped me look for particular patterns, they were not all that “educational,” and I have forgotten most of them by now.

The movements of the Beethoven quartet are (i) Allegro con brio; (ii) Adagio ma non troppo; (iii) Scherzo: Allegro; and (iv) La Molinconia: Adagio-Allegretto quasi Allegro.  For the Schumann piece: (i) Andante espressiv - Allegro molto moderato; (ii) Assai agitato; (iii) Adagio molto; and (iv) Finale: Allegro molto vivace - Quasi Trio.

The exception was the piece Blueprint, both the composer and the composition turned out to be quite interesting.  Burnham described how he heard on the news that a certain Caroline Shaw won the Pulitzer Prize in music composition and marveled at that winner as having the same name as one of the students in Princeton’s music department before it dawned on him that it was their Caroline Shaw that won the prize.  At age 30, she was the youngest winner in the music category. Blueprint was written for the Aizuri Quartet.  The word Aizuri-e in Japanese has something to do with the blue ink used in woodblock print that was imported to Japan from Europe.  What Shaw did was to “reduce” Beethoven’s Quartet we just heard into its fundamental elements, and then wrote a new quartet based on those elements, thus the title “Blueprint.”  The music equivalent of Picasso’s cubism, I guess.

If I ever write about paintings, I would say I may appreciate Picasso at a gut level, but I can never make heads or tails of how cubism informed his work.  (And I have a book on Picasso, yet to be read.)  If someone goes through the two compositions and explain to me how the Beethoven blueprint leads to Shaw’s quartet, I may be able to follow.   But I probably won’t hear it.  I joked to David that it sounded more like it was based on Quartet No. 5.

In reading up on her on Wikipedia, I found out she is a violinist, a singer, and a composer.  And another curious fact about her: she is the great-great-grand daughter of the conjoined twins Chang and Eng.

The concert was generally a good experience.  The individual players all seem to do very well.  I only wish I had a more solid grounding in chamber music to be able to appreciate it more.

We didn’t meet up for dinner as David and Vivien had a family dinner with Daniel (whom we also know.)