Jason Vieaux with Escher String Quartet
Jason Vieaux, guitarGRAMMY Award-winning guitarist Jason Vieaux joins the Escher String Quartet for an evening including Mozart’s String Quartet in D major, Kernis’ 100 Greatest Dance Hits, selections for solo guitar by Bach, Pat Metheny, and Jorge Morel, and Boccherini’s fiery Guitar Quintet in D major, the 'Fandango.'
Featured Artists
Jason Vieaux
Escher String Quartet
Jason Vieaux
guitar
GRAMMY-winner Jason Vieaux, “among the elite of today’s classical guitarists” (Gramophone), is described by NPR as “perhaps the most precise and soulful classical guitarist of his generation.”
In appearances from New York’s Lincoln Center to Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw and the Seoul Arts Center, Jason Vieaux has cemented his reputation as an artist of brilliance and uncompromised mastery. Cited for his “eloquent and vibrant performances” on disc (Gramophone Magazine) he is hailed as “virtuosic, flamboyant, dashing and, sometimes ineffably lyrical” (New York Times) on stage.
Sought-after for his extensive concerto repertoire, Vieaux has performed with a long list of orchestras including Cleveland, Toronto, St. Louis, Houston, Columbus, and has made premiere recordings with the Nashville Symphony (Leshnoff Concerto) and the Norrköping Symphony (Beal Six Sixteen). He has worked with renowned conductors including Giancarlo Guerrero, Jahja Ling, Gerard Schwarz, and David Robertson. Vieaux’s passion for new music has fostered premieres from Jeff Beal, Avner Dorman, Vivian Fung, Pierre Jalbert, Jonathan Leshnoff, David Ludwig, Mark Mancina, and Dan Visconti, among many others.
Vieaux’s extensive discography includes his “Bach Volume 2: Works for Violin” released on Azica in 2022 to rave reviews for his “eloquent and vibrant performances” (Gramophone). Additional 2022 releases include “Shining Night” featuring his duo with acclaimed violinist Anne Akiko Meyers (Avie Records) and Michael Fine’s “Concierto del Luna” with flutist Alexa Still (Sony Classical), both enjoying strong critical acclaim. Vieaux recorded Pat Metheny’s “Four Paths of Light”, a solo work dedicated to him by Pat, for Metheny’s 2021 album “Road to the Sun”. Jason Vieaux won the 2014 Best Instrumental Classical Solo Grammy Award for PLAY. The Huffington Post declared PLAY is “part of the revitalized interest in the classical guitar”.
A busy touring performer, Jason Vieaux enjoys repeated invitations from distinguished series, including San Francisco Performances, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, and the 92nd Street Y, among others. Festival engagements include Ravinia, Caramoor, Domaine-Forget, Music@Menlo, Round Top, and the Eastern Music Festival. Overseas performance venues include Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, Seoul Arts Center, Shanghai Concert Hall, Sala Sao Paolo, and Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires.
Jason Vieaux enjoys ongoing performing and recording collaborations with the Escher String Quartet, mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke, violinist Anne Akiko Meyers, harpist Yolanda Kondonassis, accordion/bandoneon virtuoso Julien Labro, and saxophone virtuoso Timothy McAllister.
In 2011 Vieaux co-founded the guitar department at the Curtis Institute of Music (with David Starobin). He has taught at the Cleveland Institute of Music for 25 years. Jason’s online Guitar School for Artistworks Inc. has hundreds of subscribers from all over the world. He plays a guitar by Gernot Wagner, 2013, made in Frankfurt.
Escher String Quartet
Escher String Quartet has received acclaim for its profound musical insight and rare tonal beauty. A former BBC New Generation Artist and recipient of the Avery Fisher Career Grant, the quartet has performed at the BBC Proms at Cadogan Hall and is a regular guest at Wigmore Hall. In its hometown of New York, the ensemble serves as season artists of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.
Highlights of the 2024-25 season find Escher String Quartet performing in many of the great venues and organizations in the United States, including Alice Tully Hall, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Shriver Hall Concert Series, Chamber Music Pittsburgh, University Musical Society at University of Michigan, Spivey Hall, and Chamber Music Houston, among others. In addition to their North American engagements, the quartet returns once again to Wigmore Hall for a BBC live broadcast recital as well as other engagements in Germany and continental Europe.
Escher String Quartet has made a distinctive impression throughout Europe, with recent debuts including the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Berlin Konzerthaus, London’s Kings Place, Slovenian Philharmonic Hall, Les Grands Interprètes Geneva, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and Auditorium du Louvre. The group has appeared at festivals such as the Heidelberg Spring Festival, Budapest’s Franz Liszt Academy, Dublin’s Great Music in Irish Houses, the Risør Chamber Music Festival in Norway, the Hong Kong International Chamber Music Festival, and the Perth International Arts Festival in Australia. Alongside its growing European profile, the Escher quartet continues to flourish in its home country, performing at the Aspen Music Festival, Bravo! Vail Mjsic Festival, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Bowdoin Music Festival, Toronto Summer Music, Cape Cod Chamber Music Festival, OKM Festival, Chamber Music San Francisco, Music@Menlo, and the Ravinia and Caramoor festivals.
Escher String Quartet achieved critical success last season in their performances of the entire cycle of string quartets by Bela Bartok in single concert format, both at Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. Their Bartok project was featured in The New Yorker in a substantial report by Alex Ross. Recently, the Escher quartet has had successful releases of multiple albums, including string quartets by Pierre Jalbert and the Escher’s studio recording of the complete Janacek quartets and Pavel Haas Quartet No. 2 with multi-award-winning percussionist Colin Currie (BIS Label). Recordings of the complete Mendelssohn quartets and beloved romantic quartets of Dvorak, Borodin, and Tchaikovsky were released on the BIS label in 2015-18 and received with the highest critical acclaim, with comments such as “...eloquent, full-blooded playing... The four players offer a beautiful blend of individuality and accord” (BBC Music Magazine).
In 2019, DANCE, an album of quintets with GRAMMY Award-winning guitarist Jason Vieaux, was enthusiastically received. In 2021, the Escher’s recording of the complete quartets of Charles Ives and Samuel Barber was met with equal excitement, including “A fascinating snapshot of American quartets, with a recording that is brilliantly detailed, this is a first-rate release all around” (Strad Magazine). The quartet has also recorded the complete Zemlinsky String Quartets in two volumes, released on the Naxos label in 2013 and 2014.
Beyond the concert hall, Escher String Quartet is proud to announce the creation of a new nonprofit entity, ESQYRE (Escher String Quartet Youth Residency Education). ESQYRE’s mission as a nonprofit classical music organization is to provide a comprehensive educational program through music performance and instruction for people of all ages. In addition to their nonprofit work, the quartet has also held faculty positions at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, TX, and the Univerity of Akron, OH.
Within months of its inception in 2005, the ensemble came to the attention of key musical figures worldwide. Championed by the Emerson Quartet, the Escher quartet was invited by both Pinchas Zukerman and Itzhak Perlman to be Quartet in Residence at each artist's summer festival: the Young Artists Program at Canada’s National Arts Centre; and the Perlman Chamber Music Program on Shelter Island, NY.
Escher String Quartet takes its name from the Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher, inspired by Escher’s method of interplay between individual components working together to form a whole.
Program Highlights
Jason Vieaux, guitar
Escher String Quartet
Adam Barnett-Hart, violin
Brendan Speltz, violin
Pierre LaPointe, viola
Brook Speltz, cello
MOZART String Quartet in D major
AARON JAY KERNIS 100 Greatest Dance Hits for Guitar and String Quartet
BACH Music for Solo Guitar from Violin Sonata No. 1
PAT METHENY Music for Solo Guitar from Four Paths of Light
JORGE MOREL Danza Brasilera for Solo Guitar
BOCCHERINI Fandango for Guitar and String Quartet
All artists, programs, and pricing subject to change.
Program Notes
String Quartet in D major, K. 575 (1789)
WOLFGANG AMADÈ MOZART (1756-91)
String Quartet in D major, K. 575
Allegretto
Andante
Menuetto (Allegretto) and Trio
Allegretto
In April 1789, Mozart traveled from Vienna to Berlin to meet Friedrich Wilhelm II, the cello-playing King of Prussia. When he got home in early June, he had in hand a commission for a set of six string quartets plus (for the king’s daughter) six easy piano sonatas. He quickly composed the D-major String Quartet, which he entered in his catalogue as “for His Majesty the King of Prussia.” A year later he finished two more quartets, leaving the royal commission for six only half fulfilled. He did worse with the requested piano sonatas, completing only one. The instrumental balance is distinctive here among Mozart’s quartets, giving unusual prominence to the lower voices—perhaps a nod to the king’s predilection for the cello. The quartet has an intimate, subdued character, with the directives sotto voce and dolce appearing in both of the first two movements. In contrast, the Menuetto offers some brusque harmonic conflicts and rhythmic displacements, and the finale is a felicitous, highly contrapuntal rondo whose character may recall the subtle, worldly wit of Così fan tutte.
100 Greatest Dance Hits (1993)
AARON JAY KERNIS (b.1960)
100 Greatest Dance Hits
Introduction
Salsa Pasada
MOR Easy Listening Slow Dance Ballad
Dance Party on the Disco Motorboat
Aaron Jay Kernis studied with John Adams, Jacob Druckman, and Charles Wuorinen, and they all left their marks: the expressive minimalism of early Adams, the bold assertiveness of Druckman, the rigorous structuralism of Wuorinen. In the end, Kernis’s wide-ranging style has earned him such honors as the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in Music (for his String Quartet No. 2, musica instrumentalis) and the 2002 Grawemeyer Award (for his cello concerto Colored Field). Popular and vernacular music fuel many of his pieces, while others seem drawn from deeply rooted classical traditions. “If there is any aspect of human existence that hasn’t shown up in Aaron Jay Kernis’s music, it’s only because he hasn’t gotten around to it yet,” wrote the San Francisco critic Joshua Kosman. Of 100 Greatest Dance Hits for guitar and string quartet, Kernis said, “I borrowed the title from those old K-Tel advertisements on late-night TV for 100 Greatest Motown Hits or 100 Greatest Soul Hits.” Its movements reflect four different genres—and know that MOR means “Middle of the Road,” here denoting something akin to Muzak.
INTERMISSION
Siciliano and Presto from Violin Sonata No. 1 in G minor, BWV 1001 (1720)
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685-1750), arranged by Jason Vieaux
Siciliano and Presto, from Violin Sonata No. 1 in G minor, BWV 1001
Bach composed six works for unaccompanied violin, three of them titled sonatas, three of them “partias” (an antiquated German usage that is today usually altered to “partitas”). He inscribed the date 1720 on the score of his violin collection, so we know the works were completed by then at the latest. We don’t know for whom he composed these pieces but it must have been a virtuoso of exorbitant abilities, capable of negotiating the technical demands of multiple stops, which Bach employs to express rich polyphonic textures—a characteristic that may lie more idiomatically on a guitar. We hear the last two movements of the Sonata No. 1—a lilting Siciliano (the only overt dance-reference in any of the unaccompanied sonatas) and a Presto finale that is a moto perpetuo of unceasing 16th-notes.
Movement II, from Four Paths of Light (2018)
PAT METHENY (b.1954)
Movement II, from Four Paths of Light
Guitarist Pat Metheny’s website bio describes his “trademarked playing style, which blended the loose and flexible articulation customarily reserved for horn players with an advanced rhythmic and harmonic sensibility—a way of playing and improvising that was modern in conception but grounded deeply in the jazz tradition of melody, swing, and the blues.” An industrious jazz guitarist and composer, he has won 20-odd GRAMMY awards in disparate categories, including Contemporary Jazz, Rock, and Best Instrumental Composition. He wrote the four-movement Four Paths of Light for Jason Vieaux, who played it on the 2021 recording Road to the Sun. The movements are labeled only I, II, III, and IV, with no suggestions of literary description—of which Vieaux observed “when the music is at its most intriguing it allows you to paint the texture, to fill in your own narrative.”
Danza brasilera (1968)
JORGE MOREL (1931-2021)
Danza brasilera
A native of Buenos Aires, Jorge Morel began playing guitar at the age of seven, toured widely in Latin America as a young man, and settled in 1961 in New York, where he became a mainstay at the Village Gate jazz club, collaborating with such jazz legends as Errol Garner, Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Kenton, and Herbie Mann. His own compositions—mostly for guitar solo, guitar ensembles, guitar with chamber groups, and guitar with orchestra—staked a place in the jazz and classical guitar repertoires. Morel described his Danza brasilera (Brazilian Dance) as jazz-influenced in its rhythm and harmony. At heart, it is a samba rich in syncopation.
Guitar Quintet in D major, G. 448, Fandango (1798)
LUIGI BOCCHERINI (1743-1805)
Guitar Quintet in D major, G. 448, Fandango
Allegro maestoso
Pastorale
Grave assai—Fandango
Luigi Boccherini gained fame as a cellist who, after his boyhood in Italy, toured to Vienna and Paris. He intended to continue on to London, but for some reason changed plans and went instead to Madrid. There he held various appointments for aristocratic musiclovers, composing at a dizzying pace. He is most famous for his chamber music, especially for string quintets with (no surprise) two cellos. To feed Spanish tastes, he transcribed a number of his chamber pieces for guitar plus string quartet. Indeed, the movements of the piece played here originally appeared in string quintets and he arranged them with guitar in 1798. The vivacious dance of the finale gives the work its nickname.
