Driving from Denver to Durango last Saturday, members of the Altius Quartet held a virtual rehearsal.
En route to becoming the resident chamber ensemble at Conservatory Music in the Mountains, the musicians listened to a Hyperion recording of something they will perform Thursday evening in their debut recital. Joseph Haydn’s “String Quartet in C major, Op. 74, No. 1” is a joyous work full of sun and shadow.
The 2011 recording features the Takács Quartet, a well-regarded ensemble formed in Budapest in 1975, now in residence at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
“They are our heroes,” violinist Andrew Giordano said in a telephone interview Saturday. “They are our mentors in Boulder, where we’ve been the resident quartet of the Western Slope Concert Series.”
When they formed Altius in 2011, all four musicians were graduate students at the Meadows School of the Arts, Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
“We may have had different goals when we entered the program,” Giordano said. “I wanted to have an orchestral career, for example. But we really enjoyed playing together, and all of us got sold on chamber music. They – the school – created the first graduate chamber ensemble-in-residence for us.”
Committed to outreach activities, the Altius Quartet tours throughout the Southwest, performing concerts and teaching master classes in public schools.
Young in chronological age, Giordano and violist Andrew Krimm are 26, cellist Zachary Reaves is the baby of the group at 25 and violinist Joshua Ulrich is the old man at 32. And yet, the ensemble has already won a case of prizes. Here’s a short list: first prize at both the Coltman Competition in Austin, Texas, and the Plowman Competition in Columbia, Missouri, and a silver medal at the Fischoff Competition in South Bend, Indiana,
This summer, the quartet has taken a detour from their Boulder residency to perform and coach young musicians in Durango for two weeks.
The Altius Quartet participated in Monday evening’s opener, performing the Brahms Piano Quintet in F minor with Adam Marks. On Thursday, the group has its own concert, where it will open with Haydn’s fairly late quartet, then play the slow movement from Anton Webern’s “Langsamer Satz,” and close with a big, multifaceted work by Tchaikovsky, “Souvenir de Florence, Op. 70.”
“We drove down here listening to the Takács recording of the Haydn,” Giordano said. “It’s inspiring.”
Composed relatively late in Haydn’s life on his return from a triumphant trip to London, the work is one of six quartets completed in the 1790s. Internationally famous by that time, at the age of 63, he composed all six for Count Anton Apponyi, chamberlain at the Viennese court. Elegant and lyrical, the quartets, of which the C major is the first, combine profundity with Haydn’s trademark light heartedness.
The closing work on the program was composed 100 years later and demonstrates a high water mark in Romanticism. Tchaikovsky’s “Souvenir” was sketched while he was in Italy the summer of 1890. He had completed the darkly mysterious opera “The Queen of Spades” and fleshed out ideas for a sextet, adding to a string quartet an additional viola (Matt Albert) and cello (David Gerstein).
The first two movements contrast a certain violence with innocence, and the final two movements completely shift to a different tone. There’s no sign at all of his Italian reverie, but movements three and four are full of folk melodies and rhythms with a Russian flavor.
Altius has taken its name from the Olympic motto: “Citius – Altius –Fortius,” or faster, higher, stronger. Given the program the ensemble has selected, the quartet has been challenged to live up to its name Thursday night.
jreynolds@durangoherald.com. Judith Reynolds is a Durango writer, artist and critic.
If you go
The Altius Quartet, chamber ensemble in residence for Conservatory Music in the Mountains, will play a concert at 7:30 p.m. Thursday in the Roshong Recital Hall, Fort Lewis College, 1000 Rim Drive. Tickets are $20 for adults and $10 for students. For more information, call 385-6820 or visit www.musicinthemountains.com.
