JACK Quartet: New York Stories

Chautauqua Auditorium 900 Baseline Road, Boulder, CO

The 2023 Robert Mann Chamber Series opens with the esteemed JACK Quartet. Hailed by The New York Times as “our leading new-music foursome,” the JACK Quartet maintains an unwavering commitment to giving voice to underheard composers. In the quartet’s New York Stories program, “Two masters of New York's downtown heyday, Philip Glass and John Zorn, bring stylistically divergent visions: a rollicking, romantic ride through a maze of patterns in Glass' epic String Quartet No. 5, and a peek into the catacombs in Manhattan's Upper West Side from John Zorn who brings medieval mystery to contemporary America. Caleb Burhans leads the listener in a healing ritual of absolution in Contritus, while Caroline Shaw pays homage to the father of the string quartet, Josef Haydn, in her Entr'acte. Morton Feldman finally reminds us of the pattern and structure all around us. New York: a city of Byzantine systems and countless ideas that defies tidy summary, but always fascinates and excites continued exploration.”

$18 – $65

Brentano String Quartet

Chautauqua Auditorium 900 Baseline Road, Boulder, CO

The 2023 Robert Mann Chamber Series continues with the “wonderful, selfless music-making” (The Times, London) of the Brentano String Quartet, Ensemble-in-Residence at the Yale School of Music. The program opens with Mozart’s intriguing “Hoffmeister” String Quartet, a chamber gem of character and complexity. Two touching memorial pieces by James MacMillan follow: his brief and delicate Memento and the miniature For Sonny, rife with pizzicato nursery rhymes and harmonies of shifting tones, composed to honor the memory of a friend’s grandson. It is fitting that Brentano ends their performance with one of the last and most profound pieces by Beethoven, since the Quartet takes its name from arts patron Antonie Brentano, believed to have been Beethoven’s mysterious “Immortal Beloved.”

$18 – $65

Brahms, Britten & Poulenc

Chautauqua Auditorium 900 Baseline Road, Boulder, CO

The Robert Mann Chamber Music Series continues by highlighting musicians from the Festival’s own ranks. Britten’s Phantasy Quartet begins with a march and proceeds with lively pastoral charm. Poulenc is a composer known for his aesthetic of irrepressible good humor; he called his jaunty but complex Sextet “an homage to the wind instruments I have loved from the moment I began composing.” Brahms’ sophisticated Second String Sextet is rich with nostalgia, but sweeps all sadness away in its warm, bright finale.

$18 – $65

Beethoven, Debussy & Dvořák

Chautauqua Auditorium 900 Baseline Road, Boulder, CO

The final concert of the 2023 Robert Mann Chamber Music Series highlights the Festival’s own musicians. Though it was composed on the early side of his career, Beethoven’s energetic String Trio in C Minor gives a decisive glimpse into the intensity of expression the composer would eventually be renowned for. In Debussy’s sparkling Danses — commissioned to showcase the rich capabilities of the harp — his first dance explores the ethereal (the “sacred”) and gradually becomes a swirling, earthly waltz (the “profane,” or secular). Dvořák composed his famous Second Piano Quintet during a happy period in his life; that contentment shines through in this treasured jewel of chamber repertoire.

$18 – $65

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Visiting Boulder

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Learn About Our Educational Programs

 

Festival Fellows

Meet the Festival Fellows: eight aspiring professional musicians who receive coaching and performance opportunities through the Festival and its guest artists.

Center for Musical Arts

This excellent community music school is also the educational arm of our organization.

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