the Chiara String Quartet

Brahms in a Bank

Being in a string quartet has some obvious perks: frequent travel, great repertoire, group comradery, exhilarating performances, great food…  One less obvious great thing about being in a quartet is being able to work, intensively, with a small group of people to create something lasting that is truly meaningful to that group (and hopefully to others).  We had that experience recently in recording two of Brahms' three string quartets (the C minor and the A minor).  We recorded these pieces before, earlier in our career, but never released them because they did not yet seem to truly represent us.  It can take years with a piece before we feel that we really are at the heart of it--not just the heart of what Brahms wrote, but the heart of how we as a group of four people intersect with Brahms' writing and each other.

 

To prepare for this session, we decided to take a step that was unprecidented for us: we decided to completely memorize the two works.  We hoped that, by getting the printed page out of the way, we would be better able to be present to each other and to the text during our recording.  This had another benefit, too:  by forcing ourselves to do the work of knowing our parts and their relation to each other "by heart," we learned the score, especially everyone ELSE's parts, to a degree that really improved our ability to listen.  We wanted to get the physical stands out of the way, but ended up getting our own parts out of the way!

 

There were other things that made these sessions special.  We booked the recording in the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall in Troy, NY--a surprising gem of a hall that is renowned for beautiful, and faithful, recorded sound.  And we hired Judith Sherman to produce the recording.  As a colleague of ours has said, "She can hear the grass grow!"  She is really wonderful, and one of the best in the business (and we would feel that way even if she were not a perennial Grammy winner for Best Classical Producer, and producer of our recently Grammy-nominated recording of Jefferson Friedman quartets.)  What she really brought to the sessions was a completely reliable fifth set of ears.  So often, in recording, we can have trouble getting outside of the process, and we get to where our standards become impossibly high for certain things we are listening for, and other important issues are unaddressed, almost aural "blind spots."  A great producer can redirect and refocus on the most important things, and, most importantly, can let us know when we have achieved a unique or special reading of the music.  Solo artists may sometimes know when that has happened.  But in a group of four people, there are eight opinions!

 

We had a great time,  No dressing up to perform, no teaching to do.  We only packed jeans for the trip!  It was like a retreat into our own sound. It is so funny to describe our recording session as magical, since it was a lot of hard work.  But really, it did feel that way.  We will get to hear the first edits in January, and then we are really excited to finish these recordings in April with the third quartet (the B-flat), and the G major viola quintet with Roger Tapping.  And we will be most excited to share these recordings with you!  (Be on the lookout in the weeks ahead for our Kickstarter page, so you can learn how to help bring this special project to its completion.)

 

In memory

Somebody said to me on the day of my grandfather’s burial, “You can’t imagine that a person you love ceases to exist.” When looking at family photographs with my grandfather gently smiling towards the camera, I find myself startling with surprise when I realize that he is no longer with us. So, I try to remember as much as I can: talking about him with family members, wearing the traditional white ribbon on my hair for mourning (modified Korean custom for modern time--mourners traditionally wore only white clothing for three years), and questioning my grandmother about his life. While trying to find out where he was born, I google-mapped North Korea and was shocked to be staring at a blank outline of the country.  I thought Google knew everything!  Even the geography of North Korea has become nameless just like the millions of people living under its totalitarian regime. I eventually located a map with details and found that my grandfather was born in a region in Northwest Korea bordering China.  Because of the Japanese occupation of Korea, his family moved to China when he was fairly young and lived in the Manchuria region until 1945 when Japan surrendered at the end of the Second World War.  It was there that he married my grandmother through an arranged marriage only four months before the end of the war.  They moved back to their homeland, go-hyang, soon after being liberated from the Japanese.  Two years later, at the request of my great-grandfather, the newlyweds relocated to Seoul, far from their go-hyang, to find life there for them and their extended family.  Their lives in the north had become too precarious with the communist’s rule as they were faced with growing persecution for their religious beliefs. [caption id="attachment_164" align="aligncenter" width="260" caption="Photograph taken outside a Korean Christian Church in China, where they were married. "] [/caption] I love this wedding photo of my grandparents.  It was sitting in a drawer for many years before I had it framed for their 50th wedding anniversary.  It’s the only thing they have left from their life before the Korean War, and they only have it because one of their distant relatives happened to bring it to the south before the war broke out.  Like many other Koreans, they never saw their extended family again.  The last communication they had was a letter from my great-grandfather urging them to observe Sundays (He was an elder at a Christian church), and the last piece of news they heard from the north was that my great-grandfather had been arrested while taking care of the abandoned church.  He was probably executed, although my great-grandmother could never find his body.  This news came from my grandfather’s cousin.  The South Korean army arrested him as a POW, but when given a choice between returning to North Korea and serving in the South Korean army, he chose the latter. My grandmother sorrowfully said of these times, “We had nothing…everybody was poor.”  After the war, my grandfather was able to support his family by working for the U.S. Army.  Since they were looking for Koreans who could speak English, he, with the equivalent of an elementary/junior high education and no prior knowledge of the language, taught himself how read, write, and speak English.  He got the job, and they were one of only a few families who could sustain themselves.  My mom recently told me that when she was young, my grandfather hoped that she could become a doctor when she was older.  Now, this may seem stereotypically Asian for a Korean parent to wish that for one’s child, but may I point out that this was more than 50 years ago in Korea!  Women were viewed (even now by some!) as second-class citizens and only good for marrying off.  It wasn’t that my mom was their only child either.  She had an older brother AND a younger brother. My grandparents immigrated to the United States in 1978 and built a life their family in Queens, NY.  My grandfather served faithfully as an elder at a Korean-American church in Elmhurst, NY for over 30 years.  Ever since his heart attack about 10 years ago, his health had been in a steady decline.  The pastor recounted at the funeral how my grandfather, hardly able to take a step without stopping to rest, would painstakingly climb the staircase to the sanctuary to attend the daily 6 AM daybreak service (sae byuk kido-Korean Christian tradition that probably stems from Buddhist practices). The burial took place in the morning, and a Chiara Quartet concert took place later that day.  It was an all Beethoven program ending with Op. 132, a piece he wrote towards the end of his life.  Beethoven wrote this after recovering from a serious illness and thus titled the slow movement with the words, "Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart" (A Convalescent's Holy Song of Thanksgiving to the Divinity, in the Lydian Mode).  I played and with the memory of soil leaving my hands to cover the coffin, I hoped for the continued memory of my grandfather’s existence.

Traveling without Babies

On my Facebook page I have a photo album entitled “Traveling with Babies.”  In this album of over 100 iPhone photos, I chronicle the past year or so of travels with the two youngest children in the Chiara Quartet, my younger daughter Ilaria (14 months) and Greg and Julie’s daughter Noori (8 months).  Pictures in this album range from shots of the quartet’s many bags, instruments and baby gear to pictures of the girls playing in various airports.  Updating this album is both fun for me and good for posterity. After the quartet’s most recent trip to Corpus Christi, TX, I am contemplating an album entitled “Traveling without Babies.”  This three-day trip to the Gulf Coast town was the first time I left Ilaria at home with my husband and older daughter Oriana.  It was a hard decision, but I knew that the time had come for us to try being apart for a few days.  I went through this same process about four years ago when I first left Oriana at home and flew off to play in California.  It felt like torture for me during the days gone from her, and I called home every hour or so, but of course when I returned she had had a blast with my husband and the time gone was a greater stress on me than on her.  Leaving my whole family was difficult for me this time around too, but similar to the last time, everyone else was fine and it was I who did the brunt of the worrying (spoken like a true mother). So what did I do with my newfound solitude?  Well, first of all, I did a lot of work on the plane, had the option of staring into space, sleeping or reading, and was able to pack a light suitcase.  We flew into San Antonio, and after dropping off bows to be rehaired at the Terra Nova Violin Shop, Jonah and I had a nice lunch and walk on the River Walk.  We drove down to Corpus Christi that evening, listening to hilarious XM Satellite radio on the way, and practiced late at the hotel.  Over the next two days when we weren’t rehearsing or performing I went for walks on the boardwalk and took my first nap in about eight months.  I went out late after our concerts and slept in.  I watched some TV.  Instead of practicing in the hotel bathroom with the door closed and my practice mute on while my daughter slept, I practiced multiple times (full-volume) before our concerts and was generally warmed-up most of the time. Of course I missed my family terribly, but with the ability to talk to them on video chat, I felt close to them.  Ilaria was able to sleep in her own bed and keep her own routine, increasingly important for a toddler.  My daughters played a lot together and had some quality time with their Dad drawing in his art studio, doing outdoor activities and making fun food.  (While I was gone, my husband, the only true carnivore in the house, made various burgers that all three of them happily consumed, and Ilaria is now no longer a vegetarian.)  Ilaria spent time with babysitters she knows instead of getting used to different people at each stop (since family and friends are not always available to help out). What I missed most on this trip was Ilaria’s sweet, wide smile and chatty interaction with everyone she meets.  She is a wonderful travel companion, a loving and supportive little friend on the road.  Even when she was four months old, traveling with me for a quartet trip in Germany with no one to help out save a few students at the local University, Ilaria made the whole ordeal easier because of her cheerful disposition. I am grateful for every moment I have with my children, and while I’m sad to end the run of taking Ilaria with me on each trip, it has been a privilege to be able to bring her on the road with me for this long. This trip in no way marks the end of traveling with my family, and certainly Greg and Julie will be bringing Noori with them on the road for an indeterminate amount of time, so the Chiara Quartet family continues to travel together.  In fact, on an upcoming trip the entire quartet family (all ten of us) will be taking an early morning flight to Boston together, and the babies will be reunited again.

One week as cellist of the Chiara Quartet

[caption id="attachment_150" align="aligncenter" width="225" caption="Chiara Quartet at WGBH"] [/caption]

Monday, Feb. 8

Still basking in the glow of a review from yesterday.  Last night was fun - after performing in Brooklyn, we rushed to JFK in time to catch a 10:40 PM JetBlue flight to Boston, arriving at our hotel in Cambridge at 1 AM.  Today, we begin the first day of a 1-week residency at Harvard University.  Before this starts, however, we need to see to some immediate business: bow rehairs.  The combination of our busy schedule and the lack of a top-notch instrument specialist in our home of Lincoln, Nebraska means we rely upon the services of bowmakers on the road.  This morning, we'll give our bows to Jonah at 8:30 AM and he will take them to David Hawthorne.  Nothing like 7 hours of fitful sleep to rejuvenate!  At 9:00, it's bathtime.  I am in charge of bathing our little girl, and she gets her baths in the morning while we are on the road.

Next on the plate is finding Grandma.  My mom flew to Boston to help Julie and I take care of our 6 month-old, Noori, and we haven't seen her yet.  Although we could hire babysitters just for the times that we need them, the fact that my mother is willing to take some time away from her work schedule and watch Noori while we are in rehearsals and classes is a godsend.

Lunch, as usual, is at Darwin's, a Cambridge fixture that is just a block from the hotel.

1 PM rolls around and finds us rehearsing in our temporary studio at Harvard, the early instrument room.  Today's business includes reading the first movement of Beethoven's Op. 59 No. 1, a piece we are not performing this week.  Why?  Our commitment at Harvard from 3-4 PM will be a class centered on that movement.  For the rest of the rehearsal, we focus on Beethoven's Op. 18 No. 3 and the Heiliger Dankgesang movement from Op. 132, in preparation for our performance on WGBH to be recorded on Tuesday afternoon.  Today's rehearsal has a surprise: I thought we were going to be playing the 2nd and 4th movements of Op. 18 No. 3 and the 3rd and 5th movements of Op. 132 on the radio.  Oops!  It's a good thing we just performed the work 3 times in the past week and so could play any of it.

After the 3 PM class, it is time to give a lesson to an advanced cellist studying with Lawrence Lesser in the NEC/Harvard dual degree program, a semi-crazy program that awards a Bachelors from Harvard and a Masters from NEC in 5 years.  We work on the Shostakovitch cello sonata, exploring the kinds of questions to ask that will lead to a deeper variety of musical characters and more extremes.  After this, it is time for an early dinner and early bedtime.

Tuesday

Today starts with a private reading of a student composition.  Afterwards, it turns out that Becca and the student both attended the same school in Norwich, Vermont.  As he put it, "high five!"

At 12:30 PM, Julie and I jump in a taxi and head towards WGBH.  The driver seems very familiar with the address, and although I don't remember it, he says that he drove us to the station the last time we played on the air in Mar. 2009.  Small world!

The performance on WGBH will be in front of a studio audience of about 50.  Looking out into the lobby, I see a lot of young children, and start to get excited about a younger crowd hearing us until Jonah asks one of them if he is coming to the concert.  He looks confused and says he's auditioning for a TV show.  So much for that theory!  The audience, although a bit older, is incredibly appreciative and very excited to hear us perform live.  Cathy Fuller will be interviewing us, and the show will broadcast as "Live from Fraser Studio" on Thursday night.  First, we perform the Op. 18 No. 3, and then the Heiliger Dankgesang.  This is a great experience, and is our first performance in front of a studio audience for radio broadcast.

The evening wraps up with a performance at Mather House on the campus of Harvard, an annual event for a small audience, and we perform Op. 59 No. 3.  My Mom watches Noori in the other room, and afterwards, I took this video of her practicing her burbling.  In the post-concert conversation, I start talking with a man named Gene Gibbons who, it turns out, was the moderator for a presidential debate between Ross Perot, Bill Clinton, and George Bush in my home town of East Lansing, Michigan.  He tells me of a story from around 2005 when he was at a yacht mooring and recognized Ross Perot coming up the dock talking animatedly to his companions.  Gene stopped him and introduced himself, saying "you may not remember me, but I asked you hard questions in the '92 debate."  Perot's response?  "Good for you!" and then continues talking to the others, ignoring Gibbons entirely.  What a character!  Hard to imagine him as the president, that would have been a wild ride.

Wednesday

In this morning, we play excerpts of Op. 18 No. 3, Op. 59 No. 3, and Op. 132 for a theory class, but the big event of the day is a recording session in the afternoon from 1:00-3:00, which we move to 1:30 in order to give a bit of time for the kids to be fed.  This recording session involves short excerpts composed by Hans Tchutchku which will be manipulated by him to write a string quartet for us with electronic manipulation of this recording.  Very cool stuff, but extremely hard and very draining.  We leave the session very satisfied, however.  It's going to be a really cool piece.

Thursday

Today's first event is the Dean's Lunchtime concert, an event in the building behind the statue of John Harvard on campus hosted by the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.  Today, we perform Op. 132 in its entirety.  This turns out to be a very meaningful performance of the piece for us, and for a few of the audience members, including some open weeping during the Heiliger Dankgesang (always a good thing when not followed by "please make it stop!").

In the afternoon, we read through a piece by another young composer, this one inspired by Morton Feldman and a bit of Webern, with some humor in the design, a very enjoyable read.  Finally, we rehearse the program for tomorrow in Paine Hall, our dress rehearsal for tomorrow night's concert.

Friday

The big day arrives with a major preview in the Boston Globe.  After a morning rehearsal, we show up to the "Performing Beethoven" symposium organized by Lewis Lockwood, author of Beethoven: The Music and the Life a 2003 Pulitzer Prize finalist.  He's also one of the most brilliant people I've met for his ability to synthesize complex information and talk about it in an easy-to-follow and engaging style.  After two talks presented by Alan Gosman of UMich and Matias Röder of Harvard, we take the stage with Lockwood Joel Smirnoff, former second and first violinist of the Juilliard Quartet.  The six of us talk about Beethoven, play examples from the repertoire, and talk about things as diverse as how to approach a Beethoven cycle to a jazzy version of the finale of Op. 59 No. 3 arranged by Smirnoff for a joint presentation we did at Juilliard with the then-new jazz program when we were the graduate quartet in residence.  All goes well, and then it is time for a quick dinner.

Arriving at the concert, we warm up for a half hour on stage, and then are told by the agitated concert manager that we have an unusually large and restless crowd.  Sure enough, when we walk on stage, every single seat in the house is filled with a body.  Fortunately, we're told that no one had to be turned away.

The concert goes well as far as we're concerned.  This is a monster program for us, both Op. 59 No. 3 and Op. 132 are enders and require ridiculous stamina, not to mention the delicacy needed in Op. 18 No. 3.  We're particularly happy with the way the first movement of Op. 59 No. 3 turns out, as well as the Heiliger Dankgesang.  The last movement of 59 3 feels a bit sloppy but with a good energy, and the audience goes wild, so that's a nice compensation.  In general, this concert leaves us with a warm feeling of having summited the works with vigor and a cohesiveness that makes all the fatigue worth the effort.

Saturday

The morning starts off, surprisingly, with a Jeremy Eichler review in the Globe.  Usually, it takes a couple of days for reviews to appear, this must have been a deadline an hour or less after we finished performing!  It's hard to know how to respond to reviews.  Impulses to take them in or ignore them abound, and many musicians tell us to ignore them altogether.  It was comforting to read Paul Katz talking in the Globe's preview on Friday about a review the Cleveland Quartet received 30 years ago.  The truth is, reviews are still extremely important for determining how you are received, and when we've gotten favorable reviews, it has generated a noticeable uptick in bookings for the next season.  So, with that context, we try to look at reviews as something to help the business end of things, not so much as an artistic tool for our playing.  The review highlights the last movement of 59 3 and mentions the Heiliger Dankgesang as not quite working due to the slow tempo, which was the opposite of our perceptions from the stage.  Interestingly enough, a student in the audience specifically mentioned liking the unusually slow tempo of the Heiliger Dankgesang as really bringing out the movement's depth.

From our perspective, it is most exciting when people have an opinion at all - and people seem to have more opinions than usual in the Beethoven cycle, so conflicting opinions are a resounding success.  We, of course, have our own conflicting opinions within the group, and that is part of what drives us forward.

After the review postmortem, it is time to get a rental car from the airport and drive the 2 hours to Northampton for tonight's concert on the "Music at Deerfield" series to play the same Beethoven program.

Tonight's concert is also packed, with probably 500 people in attendance.  Intermission is almost 10 minutes longer than usual because of the long lines at the bathroom, and so we finish performing at 10 minutes to 11.  Whew!  This concert is harder for me, I almost didn't make it through the first movement of Op. 132 from the fatigue of driving, but find a second wind in time for the Heiliger Dankgesang.

Sunday

After a morning off, we perform Op. 59 No. 3 in a benefit concert for the Northampton Community Music Center, a great local music school that presents amateur workshops as well as providing music lessons for children.  Afterwards, we drive to our manager's house for a nice dinner and a brief business meeting to discuss bookings for the summer and for next season, and then are off to the Bookmill in Montague, a place whose motto is "Books you don't need in a place you can't find."  The 35 or so who pack into the upstairs loft provide a visceral, up-close energy that we love, even when we're exhausted from performing twice in one day.  Tonight's performance, a Valentine's Day performance, features readings of Beethoven's love letters to his "Immortal Beloved" as well as movements from the three quartets we are playing.

Monday

5 AM: Noori wakes up Julie and I by saying "hi Daddy," her first sentence!

Starting at noon, we begin our Smith College Residency.  Today has us teaching a few lessons and coachings followed by a public performance/talk centered around Op. 132.  The performance of Op. 132 feels like our best yet, perhaps just because we didn't have to play two other works before it!  Afterwards, an elderly woman who had been quietly sitting in the front row talks about hearing Georges Enescu play with his quartet during the war years.  Every Sunday afternoon they would gather and hear him play the repertoire.  "Thank you for your tempi," she says, insisting that we are playing with the kind of spirit Enescu and the old masters would have loved.  Flabbergasted is not too strong of a word to describe our reaction, especially since we were only expecting Smith College undergraduate music students to show up!

Laundry and Op. 132

It is sometimes the strangest thing in the world to work on a great piece of music. Outside of the work, life goes on, laundry is washed and folded (eventually), bills are paid, children are dropped at daycare. But while the trappings of normal life continue, an amazing work of art is gradually but insistently taking hold of your inner ear. My quartet is learning the A major minor Op. 132 string quartet by Beethoven right now. When we were deciding to play the whole cycle, this was the piece that I considered the most in my vote about whether we were ready. It was the last of the late quartets for us to learn. In high school, I had a madcap romantic fling with the slow movement (the so-called Heiliger Dankgesang--"Holy Song of Thanksgiving by a Convalescent to the Divinity, in the Lydian Mode"), learning it really quickly at a summer camp. I was completely awestruck. It was so beautiful, so pure, but not child-like. It described true life but wasn't scared to remain innocent. The existence of this music made me feel like I needed to become a musician. When he wrote Op. 132, Beethoven had just recovered from an illness (they think maybe hepatitis), and he was thankful to the point of creative inspiration. The slow movement starts with a very slow chorale (a churchy, baroque-y hymn tune), and alternates with a brighter, more active bit that he marks mit neue kraft ("with new strength"). Every time the chorale returns, it has more going on around it.  By the third statement of the chorale, a poignant melody emerges over it and builds to an almost overwhelming climactic moment. And then, more than twenty minutes into the movement, he ends the piece on a long F chord.  But, since he's been writing in C major all along, it feels like when they sing "A-men" at the end of a hymn in church, but without the "-men" part. The piece literally ends without ending, with no tonal resolution (no doubt why he said the movement is in the "lydian mode"). The last couple of days, while I write emails, while I drive to work, there are a few measures of the piece that won't leave my head.  It's nothing new for things to get lodged there, although they are not always welcome.  But this works.  The piece is about thankfulness--the hardest thing (just ask Conan). It is profound, but remarkably pedestrian.  In a good way.  Like being thankful is kind of about the normal stuff.  Thanks for the toilet paper. Thanks for the cloudy, overcast day.  He never heard the piece outside of his own head, which means that his experience of this work was like this, too.  He wrote it, but even so.  Just to hear a performance of the work, he'd have to keep playing it to himself.  As he walked, as he ate, as he read.  I wonder if this piece gave him comfort, too. Beethoven lived what he wrote. He was the real deal. His life was a stormy, dramatic mess, with some kind of very palpable struggle with his God. What we hear in his music is completely devoid of emotional meddling.  He meddles with everything else to make sure that the emotions are accurate. How do you express thanks in music without words, and without sounding like a total cheeseball? He figured it out, and I'm glad to have it as the soundtrack to my life, at least until we start working on something else.

Four plus two

Six is the number of Chiara Quartet members that have been traveling to play concerts recently.  But there are four members in a quartet you say?  Yes, but we have an unusual situation right now where two women of the quartet each have a baby under one year of age.  Becca has a wonderful 11-month old girl with a drop-dead gorgeous smile and I, with my husband Greg (yes, the cellist of the quartet), have a 5-month old girl who is...again wonderful. [caption id="attachment_85" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Babies in transit"] [/caption] How do we manage?  That's a very good question since we ask ourselves that same question everyday.  The amount of luggage we had, traveling with two babies for the first time, was breathtaking (cribs, suitcases, cello, strollers, car seats, diaper bags), and Jonah wasn't even traveling with the three of us.  How did we manage?  Well, we received some help from a baggage handler, a friend, and most importantly, we laughed and kept it light.  Here's a picture from that first trip, Omaha to Washington D.C.  It really doesn't do justice since most of our luggage was under the plane or getting there. Greg and I have learned to travel a bit lighter since then. Now, a little word about playing concerts like a Beethoven cycle or recording the Brahms G-Major String Quintet (which we did with guest violist Roger Tapping in November) with babies in tow: we more than manage!  We are using our time more wisely-rehearsing efficiently, focusing on the most important matters and not getting bogged down with details.  Due to more efficient rehearsals and/or to collective parenthood (Jonah has a two year old son and Becca has another daughter who is five years old), we are more open to trying new ideas and are playing with renewed energy and commitment. Are our children inspiring us? [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="362" caption="Am I inspiring?"] [/caption] But we realize that this is all moot and our dream of playing a Beethoven cycle (which is finally happening this year!) is not even remotely possible if we didn't have help from our parents aka grandparents, especially grandmothers who have gone on tour with us. So here's to grandparents, like grandma Beaver below, who was backstage during  our concert at Strathmore Mansion taking care of both babies with calm and grace.

Ah...life and travel

Few things in life are predictable, and traveling is certainly not one of them.  Traveling as a string quartet we have learned several things that make the experience smoother: try to leave on the first flight out because you’ll have a better chance of getting to your destination, never argue with the flight attendants when they tell you your violin/viola won’t fit in the overhead (just ask in your sweetest voice “would you mind if I just try it?”), always play dumb when they lecture you on where the cello needs to sit, and sleep whenever you can.  No matter how much we try to make travel a good experience, there are always factors out of our control. For example: each of us had been on the road for differing amounts of time when we left Boston last week to come back to Nebraska.  I had spent Thanksgiving with my family down in Houston, so my baby daughter and I had been traveling for a full two weeks.  After the Thanksgiving holiday our quartet spent a week in residence at Harvard, then went out to western Massachusetts to play at Smith College and do a mini residency there. We first heard about what promised to be a terrible blizzard a day before we were heading home.  We were all sitting in the lounge at Smith College hanging out with our babies and groaning about how it would be typical that after such a tiring trip we would get stuck at one airport or another for hours on end.  We figured out that since Jonah was connecting from Boston to Newark, he could stay with his parents in New York if he couldn’t get to Omaha.  And since I was connecting through Houston, I could stay with my parents if need be.  Greg and Julie were flying direct to Kansas City, so they had flexibility if they needed to stay put before attempting to drive home.  Problem solved? All but one of those plan B travel scenarios ended up happening.  Jonah was the only one who actually got home on that crazy blizzard day.  His plane was the last to land before the Omaha airport was shut down for 24 hours due to serious blizzard conditions, high winds and the like.  He drove slowly from Omaha to Lincoln but was caught for the last ten minutes in a pure “white-out.”  Greg and Julie got to KC but were stranded in a hotel in St. Joseph, MO because highways were closed.  I was stuck (but pleasantly so, because of family) in Houston for two days trying to get home.  After three trips to the airport (they kept canceling the flights as I got there), I finally got on the last flight out of Houston, the rest of my tired family met me in the airport, and we arrived at our house after 1 am… This travel story is just one of many we’ve experienced as a quartet, and these days we just throw up our hands and know that eventually we will get to our destination.  I think of the dozens upon dozens of hours we’ve spent at O-Hare (who hasn’t); the time we were rerouted to Baltimore from LaGuardia and had to take a train into the City; the time the flight attendants wouldn’t let Greg take his cello on a flight so we had to fly to a different city, take a car service to a concert and walk on stage in our street clothes…the list goes on. As we snuggle into our cozy homes, the temperatures drop to -10 tonight, and the road crews have still not plowed the mountains of snow on our side streets here in Lincoln, I am grateful to be back home.

Playing a Beethoven cycle - for the first time

Welcome to the first post of the Chiara Quartet's new blog! As we near the Thanksgiving weekend in the United States, the quartet is also preparing to embark upon a massive journey, performances of all 16 string quartets that Ludwig van Beethoven composed in his lifetime. This is a milestone in any quartet's development, one we have waited 10 years to begin upon. Why are Beethoven's quartets such a big deal? Beethoven was the composer who truly mined the potential within the pairing of 2 violins, a viola and a cello to create the extremes of both intimacy and intensity. The range of expression, technique as a group and individuals that is demanded by these works is truly phenomenal. On top of all that, these are 16 masterpieces, some of the most incredible composition for any medium. The idea of a string quartet playing a complete cycle took hold in the mid-20th century as something of a yardstick to measure quartets against, but the idea of a cycle dates back to the mid-1800s¹. No pressure, right?

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