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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 18, 2015
Contact:
Serena Nelson
802-457-3981
[email protected]
Pentangle Launches Classical Music Summer Series with Quartet Bussières
Quartet Bussières returns to Woodstock on Sunday, May 24, 2015, 4:00 p.m. at the North Chapel
Society in Woodstock, Vermont. Launching Pentangle’s Classical Music Series, this
performance offers the opportunity to hear world renowned musicians playing a program of
diverse and technically challenging music in the Woodstock Village. Admission is free and
donations are gratefully accepted.
Quartet Bussières was formed in 2012 by a group of friends and colleagues who have close
associations with Saone-et-Loire, a region of southern Burgundy, France. Bussières is a tiny
commune in Saone-et-Loire where the quartet launched a chamber music festival in 2012 and
performed its first concert. The musicians of the quartet have known one another and performed
in various configurations together for years; from student days to collegial formations in the
Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.
The quartet features Elizabeth Chang, Bruno Eicher, Kari Docter and Nardo Poy. French-born
violinist Bruno Eicher is the Assistant Concertmaster of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra,
which he joined in 2001, after serving previously as Assistant Concertmaster of the Atlanta
Symphony Orchestra and before that of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. His wide-ranging
orchestral experience includes playing for the New York and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestras,
and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. An avid chamber musician, Mr. Eicher has performed
extensively throughout Europe, the U.S., South Korea and in New York as a member of the Met
Chamber Ensemble, which performs regularly at Carnegie Hall. In 1992, he was the second prize
winner of the Yehudi Menuhin International Violin Competition.
Elizabeth Chang, violin, has established a multifaceted career as a performer, teacher, and arts
administrator. She has given solo recitals throughout the US, as well as in Europe and South
America and has appeared as a soloist with orchestras in both the US and Europe, most notably
the Orchestra of St. Lukes and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. She is currently a faculty
member of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and New York's Juilliard School. Chang is
artistic director and founding member of The Lighthouse Chamber Players on Cape Cod and has
performed, recorded, and toured extensively, both in this country and abroad. She also coorganized the first Five College New Music Festival, which took place in September 2009 in
Amherst, Massachusetts.
Nardo Poy, viola, has been a member of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra since 1978 and also
appears regularly with several chamber music groups and orchestras in the New York area,
including the Orchestra of St. Lukes and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. He is the principal
violist of the Bard Music Festival Orchestra and the New York Symphonic Arts Orchestra, and
appears often in that position with the American Symphony. Poy has made more than sixty
recordings with Orpheus on the Deutsche Grammophon and Nonesuch labels. He has also
collaborated on a recording of vocal chamber music with Dawn Upshaw and has also recorded
works by Dvořák, Griffes, Tanyev, and Piazzola.
Kari Jane Docter, cello, is a native of Minneapolis, who as a five year old performed with a
Suzuki tour at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center, where she met then-President and Mrs.
Carter. Her later travels took her to Japan and China, where her youth orchestra participated in a
nationally televised performance from the Great Wall of China. Subsequently, while working
toward a Master’s Degree at the Juilliard School, she was awarded second prize in a Minnesota
Orchestra competition, earning her a performance on New York's WQXR. In the fall of 2002,
she joined the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. A lover of chamber music, Kari has nevertheless
been heard at such prestigious music festivals as Marlboro, Tanglewood, and the Grand Teton
Music Festival.
The concert will open with String Quartet in F Major, Op. 59, No. 1 (Ludwig van Beethoven
1770-1827). Published in the spring of 1806, Beethoven was seeking more intimate triumphs by
returning, after six years, to the most rigorous and demanding form of “pure” music—the string
quartet. The Razumovsky Quartets (named after Prince Razumovky, Russian Ambassador to
Vienna), are known for being technically challenging and psychologically intense, marking the
elevation of the quartet performance culture to its first plateau of daunting professionalism.
The quartet will continue with Kreutzer Sonata also known as String Quartet No. 1 by (Leoš
Janáček 1854-1928). Based on Leo Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata, a novella about sexual
abstinence and jealous rage, this pice depicts the psychological drama and moments of conflict
as well as emotional outburst through free varied sonic factors and modal inflections.
After a small intermission the quartet will conclude with Louis Spohr’s Duet for 2 Violins in A
minor, Op. 67, No. 1. Virtually unknown to general audiences, Spohr was a renowned violinist,
composer and conductor known for being an important figure in the development of modern
violin playing and a strong believer in new music. And while little of his music survives in the
general repertoire, he is remembered as one of the preeminent conductors of the first half of the
nineteenth century and for having invented the both the violin chin-rest and rehearsal
numbers/letters for printed music.
For more information on other Pentangle events this summer, including the rest of the Classical
Music Series, please go to www.pentanglearts.org or call 802-457-3981.