Gold Coast concert: ST. LAWRENCE STRING QUARTET

The award winning Gold Coast Chamber Players bring the finest in chamber music to Lafayette. Founded in 1987, GCCP distinguishes itself by its eclectic programming and by providing community access to leading musicians from throughout the world. The next concert titled St. Lawrence String Quartet will be performed at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, February 9, 2019 at the Lafayette Library Community Hall, 3491 Mt. Diablo Blvd. in Lafayette, Musicologist Kai Christiansen, provides a pre-concert talk 30 minutes prior to each performance. The concert is presented in partnership with the newly formed Bay Area Music Consortium (BAMC). Watch the video.

Conceived and instigated by GCCP violist Pamela Freund-Striplen, BAMC is a visionary partnership between four distinct Bay Area organizations, dedicated to presenting the finest in chamber music experiences. With the synergy of combined resources, collective planning, and a shared artistic vision, the Bay Area Music Consortium is able to present outstanding ensembles performing uniquely designed programs that enrich each of the individual member communities.

The Bay Area Music Consortium presents the St. Lawrence String Quartet and three-time Grammy nominated clarinetist Todd Palmer, in a jointly curated program of extraordinary breadth and depth. With the string quartet as centerpiece, the program spans four centuries of high art, featuring the compositions of Joseph Haydn, Jonathan Berger, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Osvaldo Golijov whose finale pairs the string quartet with the ineffably expressive Klezmer-style clarinet for a towering expression of spiritual especially prepared by the profound legacy that precedes it. Representing the intimate historical dialectic linking composers in a self-aware process of call and response, Jonathan Berger’s “Tango alla Zingarese” specifically references the Haydn Op. 20 No. 4 quartet, a 21st century creation acknowledging its 18th century forebear.

Indisputably, Beethoven’s late quartets represent a zenith of the genre where the expressive and spiritual profundity of the mysterious “Song of Thanksgiving” from Op. 132 represents a particularly lofty peak. Finally, Golijov’s “Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind” finds its programmatic inspiration in a Medieval Jewish Mystic from Provence, blind, but paradoxically one with “great sight” who’s devotion to art is akin to string quartet players where, “In their search for something that arises from tangible elements but transcends them, they are all reaching a state of communion”.

Tickets are $45- Senior (65+) $40- Student $15. Purchase online at www.gcplayers.org or by calling (925) 283-3728.

• The program offers an unprecedented musical, emotional and spiritual experience of epic proportions.
• Beethoven’s string quartet op. 132 will transport the audience into a spiritual realm cultivating a deeply vulnerable receptivity for Golijov's shattering and transcendent Klezmer-inspired finale.