by Kevin McLaughlin
For a concert marking America’s 250th anniversary, the Ciompi String Quartet and baritone Robert Sims took a broad view of what American music can mean.
On the Rocky River Chamber Music Society series at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church on October 5, the Duke University-based quartet moved among concert music, hymns, spirituals, and folk traditions in a program stretching from William Billings to Caroline Shaw. The common thread was inheritance: familiar American sounds carried forward, reshaped, and heard in new settings.
The Ciompi — violinists Eric Pritchard and Hsiao-Mei Ku, violist Jonathan Bagg, and cellist Caroline Stinson — opened with Samuel Barber’s String Quartet, Op. 11, written in 1936 and later revised. Its middle movement became the famous Adagio for Strings. In the quartet, the Adagio forms the center of a larger dramatic arc, framed by the urgent music of the outer movements.