Composer Paola Prestini has cultivated a uniquely expansive and humanistic musical voice, through pieces that transcend genre and discipline, and projects whose global impact reverberates beyond the walls of the concert hall. Far more than just notes on a page, Prestini's works give voice to those whom society has silenced, and offer a platform for the causes that are most vital to us all. Prestini has been named one of the Top 35 Female Composers in Classical Music by the Washington Post, one of the top 100 Composers in the World by National Public Radio, and one of the Top 30 Professionals of the Year by Musical America. As Co-Founder of National Sawdust, she has collaborated with luminaries like poet Robin Coste Lewis, visual artists Julie Mehretu and Nick Cave, and musical legends David Byrne, Philip Glass and Renée Fleming, and her works have been performed throughout the world with leading institutions like the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Opera, Dallas Opera, London's Barbican Center, Mexico's Bellas Artes, and many more.

The Red Book is a string quartet written in seven movements for the Thalea Quartet, commissioned by Caramoor, and inspired by Carl Jung's The Red Book: Liber Novus. The form of the quartet follows images and icons drawn from the calligraphy in the book.

This is the first extra musical work I've embarked on in a long time and I took the idea of seven movements because my favorite string quartet is Beethoven's Opus 131. Very little aside from the seven part structure is retained aside from the cyclical nature of the quartet, which in this case relates to the cyclical nature of life, and to the visual mandala which served as a binding image for Jung. A legend of images and icons accompanied his mandala, which among many others include the soul, the serpent, the sun/eye, fullness and emptiness, with at its center humanity, which ends and begins the cycle. These icons are represented in my work by different themes and music motifs that are interpolated and developed throughout the cycle. 7 visual calligraphic images from the Red Book serve as the guiding sources for the structure. The work is tied together by the notion of overcoming our contemporary malaise of spiritual alienation through this moment of collective consciousness. Jung integrates the following threads: an attempt to understand the "human" personality in general, the relation of the living and the dead, and an attempt to understand the psychological and historical effects of Christianity, and the future religious development of the West.

About The Red Book
In 2009, a manuscript that psychologist Carl Jung wrote during the years 1914–30 was published in the original German, with English translation as The Red Book: Liber Novus. It was, by Jung’s own description, a record of his “confrontation with the unconscious.” The Red Book was at the center of Jung’s self-experimentation, and although its title had been well known for years, it was not until almost 50 years after his death that its contents were revealed to the public and practicing psychotherapists. The work contains an account of his imaginings, fantasies, and induced hallucinations and his own color illustrations.

It Is Finished
A reflection on Sonata VI of Haydn’s string quartet Op. 51 “The Seven Last Words of Christ." Commissioned by The Juilliard School For Juilliard415 – The Seven Last Words Project

Sonata VI: It Is Finished takes its seed of inspiration from the first five note motivic phrase from Sonata VI of Haydn’s string quartet Op. 51 “The Seven Last Words of Christ”. I decided to extend the phrase to seven notes to complete the notion of the seven last words.

Though the original movement is quiet, intense and slow for the larger part of the work, I decided to take note of the fact that the sixth statement: “It is finished” is traditionally called  “The word of triumph”. Using a lightness of brushstroke, facility with flash, and the typical velocity of the period helped me depict that triumph, which in turn served as the inspirational coloristic underpinning of the piece.

The work begins with strums that are then cajoled into movement by fast moving septuplets. This culminates in the first declamation of the seven note phrase. Now rich and dense in its harmonic setting it provides the next musical departure: broken motives, triumphant arpeggiated moments, and a final last utterance of the original seven notes. The dichotomy in color and mood serves to represent the wholeness of the love with which Jesus lived, and the perpetual brokenness of humanity.

Composer and pianist Anthony Cheung writes music that explores the senses, a wide palette of instrumental play and affect, improvisational traditions, reimagined musical artifacts, and multiple layers of textual meaning. Described as “gritty, inventive and wonderfully assured” (San Francisco Chronicle) and praised for its “instrumental sensuality” (Chicago Tribune), his music reveals an interest in the ambiguity of sound sources and constantly shifting transformations of tuning and timbre. He has been commissioned by leading groups such as the Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Cleveland Orchestra (as the 2015-17 Daniel R. Lewis Young Composer Fellow), LA Philharmonic, Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Musikfabrik, Yarn/Wire, Dal Niente, AMOC*, and the International Contemporary Ensemble. His work “Lyra” was commissioned for the New York Philharmonic at the request of Henri Dutilleux, as part of the orchestra’s inaugural Kravis Prize for New Music. In addition, his music has been performed by the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Chicago Symphony Orchestra (MusicNOW series), Scharoun Ensemble Berlin, Minnesota Orchestra, Linea, Court-Circuit, wild Up, Atlas Ensemble, and the Taipei Chinese Orchestra. He has written works for the Parker, Escher and Spektral Quartets, violinist Jennifer Koh, flutist Claire Chase, oboist Ernest Rombout, and pianists Gilles Vonsattel, David Kaplan, Shai Wosner, and Joel Fan. His recordings include five portrait discs: All Roads (New Focus, 2022), Music for Film, Sculpture, and Captions (Kairos, 2022), Cycles and Arrows (New Focus, 2018), Dystemporal (Wergo, 2016), and Roundabouts (Ensemble Modern Medien 2014). His music and performances have also appeared on Warner Classics (performed by Bertrand Chamayou), New Focus, Tzadik, and Mode. His music is published by EAM/Schott (PSNY edition), Editions Alphonse Leduc, and in self-published editions (ASCAP). As a performer and advocate for new music, he was a co-founder of the Talea Ensemble, performing as a pianist and serving as artistic director. The recipient of a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship, Cheung has also won awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and ASCAP, and first prize in the Sixth International Dutilleux Competition (2008), as well as a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome (2012). He received a BA in Music and History from Harvard and a doctorate from Columbia University, and was a Junior Fellow at Harvard. He previouslytaught at the University of Chicago and is an Associate Professor of Music at Brown University, where he teaches courses on topics ranging from theory and composition to the jazz orchestra and Asian musical modernisms.

Rondo Relay (2022)
Commissioned by the Parker Quartet in celebration of their 20th anniversary. Written to accompany the quartet’s Beethoven cycle.

Beethoven's Op. 127 is the first of his legendary "late quartets," six string quartets that comprise Beethoven's final and perhaps greatest musical achievement. Besides some aborted sketches, he had not worked significantly in the genre for over a decade since the Op. 95 "Serioso" quartet of 1810. In the interim, Beethoven composed his final piano sonatas, the Missa Solemnis and the 9th Symphony, all magnificent works of a towering stature. The last piano sonatas, "late" in the same profound sense as the late quartets would be, inaugurated several of the stylistic traits of his final period: innovative forms bordering on fantasia, sublime beauty, deeply intimate emotion, epic lengths, superhuman virtuosity and a beautiful obsession with seemingly inexhaustible variation. Beethoven's final music seems to plumb the depths from the personal to the universal and still, somehow, beyond: transcendental.

Paradoxically, by comparison with the ineffable nature of his late quartets, Beethoven's personal life at the time is a sad tale of endless woe. By 1816, Beethoven was totally deaf, a fact that only increased his isolation and loneliness. He had suffered an unrequited love, an obsessive legal battle over his suicidal nephew Karl, and problems with his publishers, finances and physical health. But in November of 1822, the hermitic Beethoven received a godsend: a letter from a young Russian Prince Galitzin who requested "one, two or three new quartets for which labor I will be glad to pay you what you think proper." From May 1824 to November 1826 (four months before his death), Beethoven monumentally composed the three quartets for Galitzin as well as two additional quartets, his final music.

The first of the late quartets, String Quartet in E-flat Major, Op. 127, was completed in February of 1825. With inadequate time for rehearsals, the Schuppanzigh Quartet gave the premiere on March 1825 in Vienna and it was rather poorly received. One reviewer wrote that the work was an "incomprehensible, incoherent, vague, over-extended series of fantasias—chaos, from which flashes of genius emerged from time to time like lightning bolts from a black thunder cloud." But the masterwork eventually pleased while enjoying a number of performances during Beethoven's last years.

Although Op. 127 comprises four movements, it is anything but conventional. The opening movement largely follows a first-movement sonata design, but it presents a somewhat strange dramatic polarity between the gentle lyricism of the main theme and a brace of bold declamatory chords that announce the music and brashly interrupt it again three more times with a transformative effect. As if finally able to complete itself, the tender theme concludes with a surprising and poignant turn of delicate grace more like ultra-refined Mozart than Beethoven.

The second movement places us squarely in the astonishing realm of late Beethoven with an epic set of variations on a very simple but exquisitely beautiful theme. These are not Beethoven's typical variations full of brio, virtuosity and shocking contrasts. Instead, Beethoven offers a rhapsodic slow movement in which sustained lyricism spans great arcs of loosely braided contrapuntal textures in what is ultimately an extended and passionately emotional song.

A bristling Scherzo brings the music back to earth with muscular drive, rhythmic complexity full of starts and stops and a darker, quicksilver trio, all recalling some of Beethoven's finest symphonic writing. Like the other movements, this is ample and rich for a scherzo including a characteristically humorous ending.

The shortest of the movements, the finale, curiously without tempo or character marking, appears to drive the quartet home with a beneficent, even jolly affect. It features two themes, one buoyant and lighthearted, the other, insistent and heavy with stomping accents. But something special happens at the end, one of so many magical moments throughout the late quartets. Beethoven writes a coda changing the key, meter, tempo and thereby the fundamental character of the music in a transcendent miracle of variation.

© Kai Christiansen Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Daniel Chong, violin | Ken Hamao, violin | Jessica Bodner, viola | Kee-Hyun Kim, cello

Internationally recognized for their “fearless, yet probingly beautiful” (The Strad) performances, the Grammy Award-winning Parker Quartet has distinguished itself as one of the preeminent ensembles of its generation, dedicated purely to the sound and depth of their music. They are renowned for their fresh and unique approach to the great classics while being passionate ambassadors for music of our time. Inspired performances and exceptional musicianship are hallmarks of the Quartet, having appeared at the world’s most illustrious venues since its founding in 2002.

Recent seasons have included performances around North America and Europe, including Wigmore Hall, Konzerthaus Berlin, Music Toronto, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Strathmore, San Antonio Chamber Music Society, University of Chicago, the Schubert Club, 92nd Street Y, Da Camera of Houston, UCLA’s Clark Library, and Kansas City’s Friends of Chamber Music. Recent festival appearances include Big Ears, Norfolk, Lake Champlain, Bridgehampton, Skaneateles, San Miguel de Allende, and at the Banff Centre.

The Quartet’s 2024-25 season includes concerts at Carnegie Hall and Philadelphia Chamber Music Society. Additionally, the Quartet will work with and record works by Paola Prestini, as well as curate a project which includes a newly commissioned quintet by Anthony Cheung for the Quartet and mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron. This project centers on themes of nature and heritage while weaving poetry and music throughout the program.

Throughout the 2022-23 season the quartet celebrated their 20th anniversary with The Beethoven Project, a multi-faceted initiative which included performances of the complete cycle of Beethoven’s string quartets; the commissioning of six composers to write encores inspired by Beethoven’s quartets; the creation of a new video library spotlighting each Beethoven quartet; and bringing Beethoven’s music to non-traditional venues around the Quartet’s home base of Boston, including homeless shelters and youth programs.

The Quartet is committed to working with composers of today — recent commissions include works by Augusta Read Thomas, Felipe Lara, Jaehyuck Choi, Zosha di Castri, Paul Wiancko, Anthony Cheung, Wang Lu, Michi Wiancko, Sky Macklay, and Jeremy Gill. Celebrating the process of creation, the Quartet recorded three new commissions by Kate Soper, Oscar Bettison, and Vijay Iyer as part of Miller Theatre’s Mission: Commission podcast.

The Quartet regularly collaborates with a diverse range of artists, which have included pianists Menahem Pressler, Anne-Marie McDermott, Orion Weiss, Shai Wosner, Billy Childs, and Vijay Iyer; clarinetist and composer Jörg Widmann; clarinetists Anthony McGill and Charles Neidich; flutist Claire Chase; and violist Kim Kashkashian, featured on their recent Dvořák recording. The Quartet also continues to be a strong supporter of Kashkashian’s project Music for Food, participating in concerts throughout the United States for the benefit of various food banks and shelters.

Recording projects continue to be an important facet of the Quartet’s artistic output. Described by Gramophone Magazine as a ”string quartet defined by virtuosity so agile that it’s indistinguishable from the process of emotional expression,” their newest release for ECM Records features Dvořák's Viola Quintet as well as György Kurtág's Six Moments Musicaux and Officium breve in memoriam. The Strad also declared the album as “nothing short of astonishing.” Under the auspices of the Monte Carlo Festival Printemps des Arts, they recorded a disc of three Beethoven quartets, of which Diapason “admired the group’s fearlessness, exceptional control, and attention to detail.” The Quartet can also be heard playing Mendelssohn on Nimbus Records, Bartók on Zig-Zag Territoires, and the complete Ligeti Quartets on Naxos, for which they won a Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance.

The members of the Parker Quartet serve as Professors of the Practice and Blodgett Artists-in-Residence at Harvard University’s Department of Music. The Quartet also holds visiting residencies at the University of South Carolina and Walnut Hill School for the Arts.

Founded and currently based in Boston, the Parker Quartet’s numerous honors include winning the Concert Artists Guild Competition, the Grand Prix and Mozart Prize at France’s Bordeaux International String Quartet Competition, and Chamber Music America’s prestigious Cleveland Quartet Award.