by Jarrett Hoffman
Occasionally, a performance or recording is so well-crafted that a critic feels compelled to put away their journalistic spectacles and their cool, distant approach and put on a giant foam hand. That was my experience with the Jupiter String Quartet’s new album, Metamorphosis, where the ensemble shows off all the special qualities that make their performances such a thrill to hear.
by Jarrett Hoffman
One of the enduring images from last Sunday, June 9 at the Gilmour Academy’s Tudor House is of hugs being exchanged in the hallway. The Jupiter String Quartet and the young artists of the Lafontaine Quartet had just blown us away with Mendelssohn’s String Octet in E-flat, concluding the second concert in this season of ENCORE Chamber Music, and the mix of good feelings in the air was something special.
by Daniel Hathaway
Murder rarely darkens the refined world of chamber music, but on Friday, June 7, the Jupiter String Quartet dramatically broached that subject, opening ENCORE Chamber Music’s 2019 concert series with Leoš Janáček’s Quartet No. 1. Subtitled “Kreutzer Sonata,” the striking 1923 piece follows Leo Tolstoy’s psychological tale of a pianist who plays that Beethoven sonata with a virtuoso violinist and is killed by her husband in a fit of jealous rage. [Read more…]
by Jarrett Hoffman
Bohemian music celebrating life and the arts is the theme for ENCORE Chamber Music’s fourth season, titled “La Bohème.” From June through mid-July, the festival will present eight ticketed faculty concerts, seven free student performances, and seventeen free master classes, all at the Gilmour Academy in Gates Mills. Both single tickets and season passes are available.
The Jupiter String Quartet (above) kicks off the season on Friday, June 7 at 7:00 pm at the Tudor House with a program that includes Puccini’s Crisantemi (“Chrysanthemums”), Janáček’s Quartet No. 1, “Kreutzer Sonata,” and Dvořák’s Quartet No. 13 in G.
Another side of the Jupiter will be on display the next day, June 8 during master classes at 10:00 am and 4:00 pm at the campus’s middle school band room.
by Daniel Hathaway
What does an artist want you to experience when you listen to her CD? Harpist Yolanda Kondonassis is very clear about that in the liner notes for her latest recording. She wants you to be transported to “somewhere you’ve never been, but of which you might have dreamed.”
That somewhere is the special world of Maurice Ravel, charmingly miniaturized in the Oberlin Music release, Ravel: Intimate Masterpieces, a world Kondonassis first discovered through an LP of his music as a child in Oklahoma.
Joined by her fellow Oberlin Conservatory faculty members Alexa Still, flute and Richard Hawkins, clarinet; Oberlin alumni Ellie Dehn, soprano and Spencer Myer, piano; and Oberlin’s most recent ensemble in residence, the Jupiter String Quartet, Kondonassis explores four of Ravel’s exotic chamber works in performances vividly captured by recording engineer Paul Eachus. Sessions were held in Oberlin’s shining new Clonick Hall studio, expertly co-produced and edited by Erica Brenner. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hautzinger
On January 25, Oberlin Conservatory’s String Quartet Gala Concert, the biggest event of its month-long String Quartet Intensive and Festival, drew an exceptionally large crowd to Warner Concert Hall despite the cold and snow. The program featured Oberlin’s quartet-in-residence, the excellent Jupiter String Quartet; Timothy Lees, the concertmaster of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra; Oberlin faculty; and the students who participated in the Festival.
That’s an awful lot of performers for chamber music, and as the night progressed, the ensemble size grew from four to eighteen. Conversely, the music grew older, beginning with a work from the twenty-first century and ending in the nineteenth.
The Jupiter, consisting of violinists Nelson Lee and Megan Freivogel, violist Liz Freivogel, and cellist Daniel McDonough, opened the night with Dan Visconti’s Ramshackle Songs, written for them in 2009. [Read more…]