by Mike Telin
If something is meant to be, even a global pandemic can’t keep it from happening. Case in point: the Isidore String Quartet. “Technically we formed at Juilliard in 2019, but we were sent home shortly afterwards. We had not even played together for a full semester.” cellist Joshua McClendon recalled.
After reforming at Kneisel Hall Chamber Music Festival during the summer of 2021, McClendon and his colleagues — violinists Adrian Steele & Phoenix Avalon and violist Devin Moore — went on to win the 14th Banff International String Quartet Competition in 2022. In 2023 the group was awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant.
Tuesday Musical will host the Isidore String Quartet and pianist Jeremy Denk on Tuesday, March 4 at 7:30 pm at E.J. Thomas Hall in Akron. The program includes Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet in F, Gabriella Smith’s Carrot Revolution, and Johannes Brahms’ Quintet for Piano and Strings in f. Tickets are available online.
I caught up with Joshua McClendon via Zoom in Dallas, where the Quartet is the Peak Fellowship Ensemble-in-Residence at Southern Methodist University. I began our conversation by asking him about the program they’re bringing to Akron.
Joshua McClendon: It’s a collection of our personal favorites and some audience favorites as well. It’s a program that I personally love because you get a taste of such incredibly different sound worlds. And there’s never a dull moment.
MT: I love the Ravel, but what are your thoughts about the piece?
JM: I grew up loving it, so it’s been on my personal bucket list since I was very young. It’s a piece where Ravel, in his own way, is pushing the boundaries of what a string quartet can do.
It begins with such a lush sound that it’s difficult not to fall in love with it from the very first note. And the second movement is this slightly off-kilter dance with pizzicatos. It’s just fun and always exciting to my ears when I play it. The third movement is deeply moving in ways that I can’t really describe. And the finale keeps you on the edge of your seat.
MT: And speaking of lush, the Brahms is amazing. And there’s nothing like the sound of a piano quintet.
JM: I agree. The piano adds a certain level of depth and richness to the group that is hard to achieve anywhere else. It’s almost like the string quartet becomes orchestral.
MT: Have you worked with Jeremy before?
JM: We worked with him for the first time last season — we played the Franck Quintet. He was actually our first ever collaborator, so we started out on such a high note.
He was just super fun to work with and we had a wonderful chemistry with him. I think it was clear from that first concert that we wanted him to be a more frequent collaborator. So when this opportunity came up, it was an easy yes.
MT: I’ve been waiting to talk to you about Gabriella Smith’s Carrot Revolution. I think it’s a fantastic piece, but I’m not sure I know how to describe it.
JM: It is an awesome piece, but for someone who doesn’t know it, I would say that Gabriella uses all these different styles of music that you rarely find in a string quartet or even in classical settings. There’s some rock and roll, some folk Celtic kind of music, some fiddling, some Gregorian chant, some inspiration from Bach. And somehow in a short timeframe, she gives us a little taste of all of it in the quartet. There are a lot of extended techniques — I get to play percussion for 20% of the time on the cello, which is so fun to me.
MT: Moving on, I know the group does quite a bit of community work: could you tell me about PROJECT: MUSIC HEALS US?
JM: It was started by violinist Molly Carr of the Juilliard Quartet. She was dealing with an injury and wasn’t playing, so she started volunteering at a nursing home while she was rehabilitating.
She began by bringing music to the patients. She saw their response and realized that there isn’t a lot of access to live music in certain places. So she decided to devote time to bringing music to people in underrepresented communities, schools, prisons, nursing homes, hospices — the whole nine yards.
Since then she’s sent all sorts of artists, including ourselves, into these spaces. We’ve played Beethoven quartets in a prison, in a housing unit in New York, and we’ve been to a number of hospitals and hospices.
I think those have been some of my favorite experiences with the quartet, because the response and the level of connection that you feel with someone who really doesn’t have the opportunity to hear something like that every day is so special.
MT: Changing topics again: What attracted you to the cello?
JM: When I was about three, my mother was working at an administrative job in the Detroit Public Schools, and the school she worked at was a very small elementary school right across the street from our house.
It was such a close knit community and such a small place — there was only one teacher per grade level — that sometimes instead of hiring a sitter my mom would just bring me across the street to work with her. Everyone knew me and eventually I found my way to the violin class that my older sister was in. Just to keep me busy, the teacher let me play — and I never put the violin down.
Then, on my first field trip to see the Detroit Symphony, they were playing Beethoven 5. I am told that during the second movement, every time the theme came back in the cellos, I would get out of my seat and that’s when I started asking to play cello. When I was eight they finally let me switch.
MT: Then you ended up at Juilliard where you met your colleagues. What led the group to decide to become a professional quartet ? Did winning the Banff put you over the edge?
JM: That definitely put us over the edge. Before that, we only played our one to two required concerts a year at Juilliard, and we had never performed publicly outside of Juilliard. But when we were at Kneisel Hall Chamber Music Festival in 2021, we decided to give the Quartet another chance and maybe do some competitions.
I started watching the Banff Competition in 2016 when I was in high school — I remember being obsessed with it. I was always on the Banff Center YouTube page watching the competition but never imagining I could even be there.
During the summer of 2021 I saw that the Banff was coming up the following year so I threw it out there as a joke — we should apply to the Banff Competition. And when I suggested it to our coach Joel Krosnick, I expected to get laughed out of the room. But he looked me dead in the eyes with a straight face and said, “All right, let’s get to work.’
So, fast forward, we barely met the requirements to be eligible to compete. But I remember when I got that phone call out of nowhere — I saw that someone was calling from Banff, Alberta, and I almost had a heart attack. After I got the news that we were admitted, I texted the group and said “I’ve got some wonderful news and some very frightening news.”
So we just sort of lived under a rock for six months getting all the repertoire together. We had only played one Haydn quartet and were working on our first Beethoven. What were we thinking?
But in the end, I believe that being such a new group actually worked in our favor, because at a certain point, we just had to be ourselves and allow things to speak organically. And then from there, overnight we went from those two concerts in the Juilliard recital hall to upwards of 80 performances.
MT: And you’re enjoying it?
JM: Very much. It’s been a crazy almost three years now, but it’s been awesome. I’m very happy with the way the group has been able to grow. But we have the best mentors through Juilliard and festivals. I think about who we’ve gotten to work with — they’re some of the people I grew up listening to and loving and admiring as musicians, artists, and teachers. And we’re so grateful for that.
Isidore Quartet photo by Jiyang Chen
Published on ClevelandClassical.com February 26, 2025.
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