Quartrio

Announcing Partnership with the Crane and Pelican

jerryhenry — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 21:14:51 +0000

We have an exciting announcement of a new venture with the Crane and Pelican restaurant in Le Claire. Starting with our first event on September 9th, we will be presenting our Salon Classic music presentations at the Crane and Pelican with the restaurant providing a full dinner for the event. This should be a wonderful new venue in which to experience great music and great food together. The maximum number of tickets will be 40 so make sure to get your reservations in early.

We plan to continue our present Salon Classic series in our home as well. We are still working out the smaller details of our new adventure with the C&P so stay tuned for updates.

All American Performance June 15th

jerryhenry — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 13:55:41 +0000

Our next performance is at the arboretum in Clinton on Tuesday June 15th. The rain date is for Thursday the 17th. The concert is held outdoor so bring a chair or a blanket for sitting on the grass. We have decided to make this a decidedly American performance. We will perform music by American composers, and perform several movements of Dvorak’s American String Quartet. He did write it while living in Iowa after all. There is no admission fee for the hour long concert.

We have also posted our next Salon Classic dates. We have scheduled concerts in late August, and mid December. The featured pieces have yet to be picked for this event. We will let you know as soon as we make a little more headway on the programming. We have held our pricing for this year’s series at the same level. $60 for the two concert series, and $35 for individual events. This is still the best bargain anywhere and this remains an absolutely unique musical experience. Please join us.

Quartrio is also working on a possible partnership with a local Le Claire establishment. Stay tuned for more news on that front.

Spring Salon Classics

jerryhenry — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:15:24 +0000

You may be wondering where the spring dates are for our Salon Classics Series. We have agreed to play for the Zion Concert Series on May 2nd, and also to perform for the Clinton Arboretum on their summer program in June as we have for the past several years. Combining those two concerts with our individual schedules proved to be too much for us to come up with a good plan for a Spring “Salon Classics” concert. Because we are not a full time quartet we have to be careful to apportion our time for large presentations appropriately. If we take on too much we will not be able to play at the level the music and our audience deserves. We wish to retain an appropriate balance between our family life, our work life, our life as musicians, and our life as a quartet. The “Salon Classics” began as a way to get our quartet together and work on great music for fun, and then share that music with others. If it is to remain fun we can not allow it to take over our lives.

With this in mind we look forward to restarting the Salon Classic Series in late August or early September. We should have our 2010 dates posted in the near future. If you would like us to contact you when the dates are posted, please take a few moments and send an e-mail to us : jhenry@quartrio.com We will contact you as soon as we know our dates.

Winter Wonderland

jerryhenry — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 14:18:27 +0000

Winter Wonderland, our December project, is only a little over one week away. We will be playing as a trio for this concert. Sarah had her baby and is doing well, but she decided that this event would take her away from her family a bit too much and require too much time. We have scheduled Beethoven’s Serenade in D major, Opus 8 for string trio as our focus piece. It has great variety and is fun. We find the slow movements to be the most difficult to wrap our minds around, especially the complex rhythms that happen when a composer decides a slow movement should have lots of fast notes. Decorations for the event are already up and things look very festive. We hope you will join us on the 13th of December for our presentation. We will soon be deciding on a spring date. We have already scheduled a formal concert at Zion Lutheran Church in Clinton on the 2nd of May, so we will only be doing one spring concert. Look for more updates on our website.

Summer Simple in Three Weeks

jerryhenry — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 20:37:38 +0000

The summer has zoomed by, and we are now preparing for our August 29th performance of Borodin’s String Quartet number two. This will be our first performance set on a Saturday. We hope this does not confuse patrons of our previous performances. Everything else will remain the same with two performance times, great food, and the same structure. We hope you will join us for the August performances.

June Presentations

jerryhenry — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 13:34:49 +0000

We are coming up on our two June performances with amazing speed. It is only two weeks before our evening performance on June 16th at the Arb in Clinton. We always look forward to this outdoor presentation. The Arb is so beautiful and inspirational, and the peaceful surroundings lend themselves to a string quartet. Less than two weeks after that performance we will feature the Haydn “Horseman” quartet in our next Salon Classic concert on June 28th. The theme for this concert is Summer Fancy and you are just going to have to guess what this means. The house will look different again for this performance. As always, you can count on great food, great music, and great camaraderie at these events. Everything is so green and beautiful up in the bluffs at this time of year. Flowers are beginning to bloom and plants are sprouting everywhere. The setting is perfect for an afternoon or evening of relaxation and music making and listening. We hope you will join us in June.

Spring Flight has Landed

jerryhenry — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:59:35 +0000

Our third Salon Classic house concert entitled, “Spring Flight” occured this past Sunday, April 26th. Spring is a busy time of year, and Sunday was a busy day for many people. My wife Jennifer had to leave before the concert to attend a continuing education class. Previous host and hostess volunteers were unavailable so we had to recruit new ones. We lucked out in that not only were they willing to volunteer their time, but they also volunteered to bring some of our appetizers. The table was spectacular and one patron walked in, looked at it and said, “This is already worth it.” That was before the music even began. We had hung kites from around the world throughout the performance area. Check out the picture section of our web site to see them. Pre concert music included movements from Spring by Vivaldi and also a large portion of Handel’s Water Music. The formal concert featured Beethoven’s 7th String Quartet. People from Beethoven’s time were less than enthusiastic about the three quartets in his opus 59. These are the first quartets from his middle period and they are such a departure from standard string quartets of the day that people didn’t know what to make of them. They are big, complex, and challenging. Playing them takes the performers to another world, and I would guess that listening up close and personal does the same thing for the audience members. We ended up taking an intermission after the first two movements at both performances. Everyone seemed to apprecieate the break. We continue to share information about the world when the music was written, the composer, and the music itself. This seems to make the music more approachable and gives people points of relaxation between the movements. Our home continues to get rave reviews as a performance venue because of its unique character and because of its surprisingly fantastic accoustics. We hope you will join us for one of our upcoming presentations. Our next performance is outdoors at the Arboretum in Clinton on June 16th with a rain date of June 18th. This performance is free of charge. Our next Salon Classic concert is scheduled for June 28th. If you haven’t been to one yet, you don’t know what you’re missing. Almost everyone comes away saying it is so much more than they were expecting. Please consider joining us in June.

Two Months Until Spring Flight

jerryhenry — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 17:01:31 +0000

We had a wonderful rehearsal last evening. We are digging in to the Beethoven, and what a spectacular piece it is. The music rings with excitement, power, and laughter. I thought I would share with you some of the work that goes into the preparation of our performances. Our rehearsals generally get started at about 6:45 with our agreed upon meeting time being 6:30. I got home from my day at 6:29, but I did beat the other quartet members by a few minutes. Once we begin to work we don’t ever take a specified break. When someone has to go to the bathroom they go while the rest of us either work on our parts individually, or we work on a section without the missing person. Once we start rehearsing that is what we do. Discussions of our lives and days are put off until the end of rehearsal, although sometimes we do share musical anecdotes that seem to fit with what we are working on. We usually stop at about 9:30 even though it is difficult to find a good stopping point. If there were not children and families to get back to I suspect we would go longer. We always have some sort of treat afterward as we wind down from the energy and concentration of the rehearsal.

The rehearsals are quite intense with lots of discussion about phrasing, bowing, and musical nuances. With Beethoven much of the discussion centers around dynamics. One of Beethoven’s favorite techniques is to make sudden and startling changes in the dynamic of the piece. The changes he makes are often a complete surprise because they do not follow the expected standard patterns. When a line of music goes up and gets louder the end of the phrase is often the loudest moment. In this quartet the music is clearly moving towards the highpoint and the highest point is often a change to very soft. Sometimes the opposite is true as a phrase will seemingly wind down and the end is a totally unsuspected fortissimo. It is very hard to make these changes as abruptly as Beethoven requests them to be, and you wouldn’t believe the number of times we will go over the same spot and make the same “traditional” mistake. This is especially true of finishing the big sounding phrases with sudden soft playing. When we finally get it right the music seems to jump out with an excitement that is hard to explain.

We are playing together more often this year, and it shows. We are beginning to read each other more quickly, adjust while we play without talking as much, and generally coming together faster in the difficult sections. The second movement of the Beethoven is a doozy, but we were able to get through the entire movement at the end of last evening’s rehearsal. During rehearsal we even had to pull out the metronome for one section, which is a little unusual for us, but our final run through at the end of the evening went well. While it will take a little fine tuning to make it truly performance ready, it was pretty close after just one rehearsal. We worked on the first two movements last evening, and we will work mostly on the last two movements at our next rehearsal. To give you an idea, both movements are over ten minutes in length. For the most part we are not working on notes as it is expected that the quartet members will come to the rehearsal with the notes learned. Our time is spent on creating music by matching what the members of the ensemble do. We match the lengths of notes, type and direction of bow strokes, dynamics, and we try to find the balance between the four voices that brings out the most excitement and musical integrity. Many of the nuances we spend time on will not be specifically noticed by the audience, but when we match up all of our nuances the result is a crisp and polished performance that lets the music speak for itself. While a patron may not say that the group did a wonderful piano or a startling forte, the overall impression that comes out is of music that has power and excitement. That is what should come from good Beethoven. For the most part his music is not subtle. It is bold and it forces itself upon you and makes you sit up and take notice. This is the effect we are working hard to achieve in his 7th quartet. We hope you will come and see if we get it right.

We are really looking forward to the April performance. Please join us on April 26th at either 2:30 or 7:00. Series and individual concert tickets are on sale now.

Beethoven and Haydn, our next features

jerryhenry — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 15:57:02 +0000

Well, we have finally decided on our feature presentations for the Spring and Summer Quartrio concerts. With so much literature available and so many options it is hard to decide what to do next. We are doing our best to pick outstanding repertoire from a variety of styles, time periods, and composers. Our April event will feature Beethoven’s quartet number 7 in F Major. This is the first quartet from Beethoven’s opus 59 and comes from his middle period where he is beginning to find his own voice, leaving the classical quartets behind. The first of three “Razumovsky” quartets, so called because of the Russian Count who commissioned them, is a full 45 minutes in length and an epic quartet by any definition. Beethoven is considered by many to be the greatest composer in the string quartet idiom. This quartet, along with the two others from opus 59 were published in 1808. In the summer we have gone to the father of the string quartet, Papa Haydn. We have decided on “The Horseman” or “Rider” quartet as our feature presentation. The quartet is listed as No. 59 in G Minor and is the third and last quartet from his Op. 74. Depending on how you define and attribute his string quartets, Haydn wrote between 67 and 83 of them. Opus 74 was published in 1793. Haydn found the string quartet to be a perfect vehicle for his ideas and he spent a great deal of his compositional life working on perfecting the form. Our first four performances have featured Schubert, Dvorak, Beethoven, and Haydn. We are already beginning to think about what comes next. Suggestions are welcome. Don’t forget to get your tickets ordered for our April and June performances.

Quartrio announces new ticket policy

jerryhenry — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 14:32:06 +0000

We have made a change in our ticket policy. When we began our Salon Classic concerts we wanted to encourage sales of a two ticket package to ensure the viability of the project. While we still wish to encourage patrons to use the discounted series package we have decided that it is in the best interests of Quartrio and of our patrons to become a strictly first come first served operation. Single tickets are now available for all events as soon as the event dates are established. Series tickets will also be available as long as seats remain for both performance dates. When an event is sold out, discounted series tickets will no longer be available. This change is effective immediately.

We are now selling both individual and series tickets for our April 26 and June 28 Salon Classic performances. The theme for April is Spring Flight, and for June is Summer Fancy. Please contact us if you would like tickets for either or both performances. We hope you will join us.

Jerry