This weekend, members of the Permian Basin String Quartet will present the final concert of their Chamber Series for the 2022-23 season.
The spring concert will take place at 3 p.m. April 23 at the Rea-Greathouse Recital Hall at the Wagner Noël Performing Arts Center.
The Permian Basin String Quartet consists of Alejandro Gomez Guillen and Sarah Cranor on violin, Conrad Sclar on viola and Suyeon Kim on cello.
This weekend’s concert will consist of “Quartet No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 27” by Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg and “Four on the Floor” by American composer Judd Greenstein.
Grieg lived from 1843-1907 and is widely considered one of the leading Romantic era composers.
His use of Norwegian folk music in his own compositions brought the music of Norway to fame as well as helping to develop a national identity as much as Jean Sibelius did in Finland and Bendrich Smetana in Bohemia.
“Edvard Grieg, he essentially retreated to his home country and wrote this piece to really write what he felt and what he felt was a part of his heritage and culture,” Sclar said. “It’s an epic work. It’s a titanic work. The whole quartet’s about a half hour long.”
This piece is Grieg’s second of three string quartets and was believed to be written in 1877-78.
Members of the quartet described some of the challenges in performing Grieg’s piece.
“He’s writing oftentimes for eight voices so each of us will be playing a minimum of two notes in certain places,” Sclar said. “It’s really a push the limits of the quartet sound. The first movement is very turbulent and sort of dramatic and really fun. Then, the second movement is this love theme that gets broken up by this very dramatic turbulent part. As we were rehearsing this, we were joking that this feels very Mediterranean instead of very Nordic. The third movement feels like a homage to those bigger, symphonic works where the beats are offset from each other. Mechanically, it’s a super, interesting movement and then it ends on a rip roar and fun, good time movement for us.”
Kim said there are different kinds of emotions that the piece has to offer.
“I would say that I’m really excited for the audience to go through all the emotions throughout this concert because this is no ordinary quartet,” Kim said. “There are different themes and emotions that you can experience and draw all kinds of stories in your head while listening to it.”
For Cranor, one of her favorite things about “Quartet No. 1” is how the opening gesture comes back, over and over.
“It feels different every time because of what just happened before,” Cranor said. “There’s something comforting about that.”
Greenstein’s “Four on the Floor” also brought its share of challenges to the quartet at first.
“To be completely honest, I was very intimidated when I first listened to the music but as we all do after rehearsing, we started to get the hang of it,” Kim said. “Now, I’m really enjoying it. Just like the first quartet, this is no ordinary quartet. It has jazz and all these rock and roll elements that are very fun and exciting.”
Born and raised in Manhattan, Greenstein is a composer of contemporary classical music and is also co-director of New Amsterdam Records.
“It’s such a cool piece,” Cranor said. “I think we’ve grown through getting to know it and it makes us explore efforts of our playing that we don’t necessarily get to in other places, like parallel double stops, like parallel fourths… many in a row. That’s not something we typically play anywhere else and it’s a really cool sound but also really difficult. But it’s been really fun.”
This past weekend, the West Texas Symphony put on its final Masterworks Series concert for the season with Rachmaninoff, featuring Caroline Hong on piano as a special guest.
“This past weekend’s concert was awesome,” Sclar said. “It was one of my favorites of the season. Every orchestra wants to play the Rachmaninoff piano concerto. It’s just an amazing piece. The soloist was awesome. She did amazing stuff with that piece. It’s so brutally hard and she did it so well. It was amazing.”
The concert also consisted of a side-by-side with the University of Texas Permian Basin Orchestra.
“That aspect was super fun,” Sclar said. “The kids prepped really hard and their directors were really invested and there to help them be a part of it.”
For tickets for this weekend’s Permian Basin String Quartet, go to tinyurl.com/3akur7up.
If you go
- What: Permian Basin String Quartet.
- When: 3 p.m. April 23.
- Where: Rea-Greathouse Recital Hall at Wagner Noël Performing Arts Center.
- Where to purchase tickets: tinyurl.com/3akur7up
