Hausmann Quartet: Haydn Voyages
The 2022 season will open with Stars Align, a program featuring two of Haydn’s sunniest quartets alongside works by Leila Adu-Gilmore and Germaine Taillefaire.
February 6 - Stars Align
The season opens with a dramatic and optimistic afternoon of two of Haydn’s more joyous quartets (opus 33/6 and 77/1) alongside works by two women with strikingly original musical voices: Leila Adu-Gilmore’s if the stars align… (a composer whose own star is rising fast) and French Romantic (and member of Les Six) Germaine Taillefaire’s Quartet from 1919. Join the Hausmann Quartet for a celebratory opening to 2022’s concert season.
May 8 - Folk Beats
Two works that explore the folk music of their native lands in extraordinary ways anchor this concert: Bela Bartok’s Third String Quartet (1927) is his shortest, yet packs incredible power and variety in its use of raucous dance rhythms and haunting melodies. The afternoon’s two Haydn quartets (opus 17/6 and 64/6) both feature creative use of popular idioms and tunes, with Haydn’s characteristic blend of the most fashionable trends of the time and more rustic, everyday folk material. Shelley Washington’s Middleground (from 2016) is a celebration and reminiscence of places and feelings from the composer’s upbringing, “the space grounded, the between, the center[…]Home of the heart, heart of the home.”
September 18 - Blueprint for Four
Four compositional giants meet on this concert program: Haydn, Beethoven, John Cage and Caroline Shaw. The dialogue among them is sometimes direct, and at other times less obvious, but Caroline Shaw sums it up best in her program note to her 2016 work, Blueprint:
“Chamber music is ultimately about conversation without words. We talk to each other with our dynamics and articulations, and we try to give voice to the composers whose music has inspired us to gather in the same room and play music. Blueprint is also a conversation — with Beethoven, with Haydn (his teacher and the "father" of the string quartet), and with the joys and malinconia of his Op. 18 No. 6.”
November 6 - Nature Sounds
A world premiere quintet by Jessica Meyer (commissioned for the Hausmann Quartet and featuring the composer performing on viola) is the centerpiece of this program, which explores our relationship to the natural world and the alarming changes it is undergoing. George Walker’s tender, evocative Lyric and Haydn’s sunny opus 20/2 quartet are matched with Peter Schulthorpe’s hauntingly beautiful Quartet #18, his “heartfelt expression of my concern about climate change, about the future of our fragile planet.”
