by Jarrett Hoffman
The Brentano String Quartet has an affinity for both the standard repertoire and music very old and very new. Their program on the Oberlin Artist Recital Series at Finney Chapel on Friday, March 30 at 8:00 pm covers all those bases. Beginning with arrangements of madrigals by Monteverdi and Gesualdo, they’ll jump 400 years to the music of Oberlin Conservatory composition chair Stephen Hartke, then close with Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 12 in D-flat.
Among the Brentano’s many honors, violinists Serena Canin and Mark Steinberg, violist Misha Amory, and cellist Nina Lee celebrated the Quartet’s “silver anniversary” — 25 years — in 2017.
“Our friendship has been the real sine qua non for continuing as a long-term quartet,” Amory wrote in an email while the Quartet was in Spain. “It is possible that we spend as much time with each other as we do with our own families, which without our love and esteem for one another would be a tough proposition. We are not a group that would thrive well on a business-based type of arrangement, where we would meet for rehearsals and concerts but otherwise have nothing to do with each other.”
Bass-baritone
“It’s amazing how professional choral singing has changed in the past 10 to 15 years,” Gregory Ristow, director of vocal ensembles at the Oberlin Conservatory, said during a recent conversation. “And the singers in Roomful of Teeth are the perfect model for our students because their careers are multi-faceted.”
Like many musicians, British pianist Benjamin Grosvenor’s career received a jump start after winning a competition. “I won the keyboard section of the BBC Young Musician in 2004, and this began my performing career,” Grosvenor said in an email. “Obviously I was very young at that point and did not play very much, but the attention from the competition brought me concerts.” The pianist later became part of BBC’s Radio 3 New Generation Artist Scheme, which he said was “particularly important for my career, leading to opportunities such as performing at the BBC Proms as well as giving vital recording experience and the possibility to develop relationships with the BBC orchestras.”
