New Music Ensemble JACK Quartet Debuts in the Kimmel Center’s Innovation Studio, January 23
JANUARY 8, 2010
“…a bandlike mentality and a funky
contemporary vibe” – Washington
Post
“...such energy and panache that the performance
becomes a wholly new, involving experience." – Guardian
New York-based string ensemble JACK Quartet brings
its “explosive virtuosity” (Boston
Globe) to contemporary-classical music in the Kimmel
Center’s Innovation
Studio on Saturday, January 23, 2010 at 7:30pm. Since forming at Eastman School of Music in 2004, the
quartet has established itself internationally with performances of some of the
most demanding works across modern music’s vast spectrum, from European avant-garde
to world-influenced music to the wildly experimental. The
quartet’s most recent CD, a recording of modernist composer Iannis Xenakis' complete string quartets,
was featured on the “Best
of 2009” lists of the Los Angeles Times,
The New Yorker and The Boston
Globe, among others. Also in
2009, the quartet received an ASCAP/Chamber Music America Award for Adventurous
Programming of Contemporary Music.
This performance marks the ensemble’s first full-length
program at the Kimmel
Center since debuting at
the Summer Solstice Celebration in 2008. The program will include works by German
composers Wolfgang Rihm and Matthias Pintscher; UK-based conductor-composer Aaron
Cassidy; and New York-based composer Jeff Myers’ “dopamine,” which was written
for the quartet.
This concert is
presented by Kimmel
Center Presents in
association with bowerbird.
The Fresh Ink Series has been funded by the Pew Center
for Arts and Heritage through the Philadelphia
Music Project.
This is the third
concert in the Fresh Ink series during the 2009/10
season. The next concert in the series will be Absolute Ensemble featuring pianist Simone Dinnerstein on Saturday,
February 20, 2010 at 7:30pm in Perelman Theater.
General admission tickets for JACK Quartet are available for $10
and can be purchased by calling 215-893-1999, online at www.kimmelcenter.org, or at the Kimmel Center
box office, open daily from 10am to 6pm and later on performance evenings.
(Additional fees may apply.) For group sales call 215-790-5883.
JACK Quartet members violinists Christopher Otto and
Ari Streisfeld, violist John Pickford Richards and cellist Kevin McFarland came
together in 2004 while attending Eastman School of Music in
Rochester, N.Y., and quickly established a reputation for giving high-energy performances
of today's most challenging works for string quartet. The quartet has
studied closely with Arditti Quartet, Kronos Quartet, Muir String Quartet, and
members of the Ensemble Intercontemporai, daringly pursuing period, non-Western
and popular performance styles in addition to standard and contemporary
repertoire. The quartet has performed
at Carnegie Hall, La Biennale di Venezia (Italy),
the Lucerne Festival (Switzerland)
and the Festival Internacional Chihuahua (Mexico) with future appearances at New York's Morgan Library & Museum, the Library of Congress in Washington,
D.C., and the Donaueschinger Musiktage (Germany), among
others.
John Pickford Richards
holds degrees from the Interlochen
Arts Academy
and Eastman School of Music where his primary teachers were David Holland and
John Graham. He is a member of Alarm Will Sound,
bringing him into close contact with such composers as John Adams, Wolfgang
Rihm, Meredith Monk and Steve Reich at venues including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center and The Roxy. Richards has
performed as soloist with the Pasadena Symphony Orchestra, Armenian
Philharmonic Orchestra, Ossia New Music, and recently performed the solo part
to Luciano Berio's Chemins II at the Lucerne
Festival Academy
under the direction of Pierre Boulez. He taught for three years at Dickinson College
in Carlisle, Pennsylvania,
and currently lives in New York.
Ari Streisfeld
began playing the violin at age six and grew up studying with Philadelphia
Orchestra members Paul Arnold and Yayoi Numazawa. He received his bachelor’s
degree from the Eastman School of Music studying with Zvi Zeitlin and his
master’s degree from Northwestern
University studying with
Almita Vamos. He was a member of Dal Niente and has worked with composers
Steven Mackey, Bernard Rands, Robert Morris, Carlos Sánchez-Gutiérrez, Ricardo
Zohn Muldoon and David Liptak. Streisfeld attended the Music
Academy of the West, New York String
Orchestra Seminar, Kent/Blossom Music Festival and the Lucerne Festival
Academy. He was a
recipient of an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award and currently resides
in Cambridge, MA,
while pursuing his Doctorate of Musical Arts at Boston University
studying with Peter Zazofsky.
Christopher Otto
studied composition at the Eastman School of Music with Martin Bresnick, David
Liptak and Robert Morris. As a violinist, he has premiered many compositions
and worked with such composers as Harrison Birtwistle, Pierre Boulez, Helmut
Lachenmann and Steve Reich. Otto has participated as composer and performer in
such contemporary music festivals as the Lucerne Festival Academy,
Internationale Musikinstitut Darmstadt,
Karlheinz Stockhausen Courses, Institute and Festival for Contemporary
Performance at the Mannes College of Music, June in Buffalo, and Festival
Internacional de Música Contemporánea de Michoacán.
Kevin McFarland
received a bachelor’s degree in composition from the Eastman School of Music.
While a student there he was a highly active performer of contemporary music,
including frequent concerts with the school’s Ossia New Music and Musica Nova
ensembles, and over 100 premieres of works by faculty and students. He is a
member of the Tarab Cello Ensemble, a group dedicated to the commissioning and
performance of new music for cello octet.
Kimmel Center Presents 2009/10 Season is sponsored by
Citi. American Airlines is the Official Airline of Kimmel Center Presents.
Free at the Kimmel
programming and subsidized tickets offered to the community and social service
groups for $10 are made possible through the Wachovia Gateway to the Arts
Community Access Program, supported by a generous grant from the Wachovia
Foundation.
The Kimmel
Center is a recipient of
partnership funding through the nationally recognized PNC “Grow Up Great”
initiative, a ten-year, $100 million investment preparing children for success
in school and life. Funding gives support to the Kimmel Center’s
early childhood program “Bop and Swing,” an arts program for children 1-5 years
old, designed to promote an appreciation for American culture.
KIMMEL CENTER PRESENTS SPONSORED BY CITI
Saturday, January 23, 2010 | 7:30pm
Innovation Studio
Fresh Ink
JACK Quartet
Christopher Otto, violin
Ari Streisfeld, violin
John Pickford
Richards, viola
Kevin McFarland, cello
Program:
JEFF MYERS: dopamine (written for JACK)
MATTHIAS PINTCHER: Study IV for Treatise on the Veil (U.S. premiere)
AARON CASSIDY: String Quartet
WOLFGANG RIHM: String Quartet No. 3, Im Innersten
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