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The Apple Hill String Quartet will give concerts in Santa Fe and Albuquerque.
Members of the Apple Hill String Quartet present concerts and educational programs in Santa Fe and Albuquerque during the upcoming week as guests of the chamber music performance group Serenata of Santa Fe.
Violinists Elise Kuder and Sarah Kim, violist Michael Kelley and cellist Rupert Thompson form the quartet, which is in residence at New Hampshire’s Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music.
A musical organization that was founded in the early 1970s, the Apple Hill Center concentrates on performing, creating and teaching chamber music repertoire. Intermediate to professional level musicians benefit from instruction that takes place in New Hampshire and in communities around the country through its outreach program.
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If you go WHAT: Serenata of Santa Fe presents the Apple Hill String Quartet WHEN and WHERE: 6 p.m. Friday, March 22, Scottish Rite Center, 463 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe; 10:30 a.m. March 24, The Kosmos, 1715 Fifth St., Albuquerque HOW MUCH: For Santa Fe concert, $25, call 505-988-1234 for tickets; Albuquerque concert $15 general admission, $9 for students and those 30 years and under, $5 ages 12 and under, call 463-5824 |
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Apple Hill String Quartet will work with youths at the Santa Fe Children’s Museum, Santa Fe High School and Capitol High School and will present a master class at the University of New Mexico’s School of Music. Public performances are scheduled at the Scottish Rite Center in Santa Fe on Friday night and at Sunday Chatter at the Kosmos on March 24.
“The four of us have been playing together for five years,” said Kuder by phone from New Hampshire. “While we may have different favorite pieces, all of us like to play a variety of music from the old masters to newly commissioned works.”
Serenata of Santa Fe’s artistic director and oboist Pamela Epple invited the Apple Hill String Quartet to New Mexico. During the summer Epple teaches and performs at Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music.
“I first met Pamela when I attended Apple Hill as a student in the 1980s,” said Kuder. “Apple Hill has been pivotal in my career. It was after studying there in the ’80s that I decided to pursue chamber music as a profession.”
The Apple Hill String Quartet will play Domenico Cimarosa’s Concerto for oboe and strings in Santa Fe and Albuquerque with Epple on the oboe. The rest of the two programs are quite different. When in Santa Fe, the string quartet will play works by Gyorgy Ligeti, Edvard Grieg and Johannes Brahms.
“The Grieg string quartet we’re playing is the only one he finished,” Kuder explained. “It’s romantic, passionate and tuneful. There are Norwegian folk melodies in it.”
Folk melodies also are pervasive in Ligeti’s String Quartet No. 1, which was written in 1953 and 1954. Although several of Béla Bartók’s string quartets are reputed to have inspired this work, Kuder said the piece has a modern feel and does not sound like Bartók at all.
The Albuquerque performance features pieces by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Stravinsky and Ãstor Piazzolla. While Igor Stravinsky’s “Tango” was written for the piano and arranged for a string quartet by a friend of the Apple Hill String Quartet, Piazzolla’s “Four, For Tango,” which is also on the program, was composed for a string quartet.
“The Piazzolla piece is definitely a tango, but it’s quite experimental,” said Kuder. “The piece has got crazy sounds. It’s very cool, fun to play, virtuosic and wacky.”
