Two sisters played a piece from a Puerto Rican composer. A young maestro showed what the violin could do. And a quartet revisited — and reintroduced — a classic. The Saturday evening virtual performances and the Q&A that followed were all part of Music Haven‘s third Album Drop, an ongoing concert series that shows how the New Haven-based organization continues its work of nurturing its students and bringing more music to the Elm City.
Music Haven students Yaki and Jocelyn Francisco-Perez kicked off the concert with a performance of “La Despedida,” by celebrated 19th-century Puerto Rican composer Felipe Gutiérrez y Espinosa. The sisters played as one, concentrating on the music. At the end, they broke into a smile that surely engendered applause from the virtual audience, which numbered over 100.
Violinist and composer Patrick Doane then performed two pieces — beginning with one of his own: the Allegro movement from his 2020 Sonata for Violin. “I wrote it in the summer and I think it inhabits those long summer days of blistering sun, and all the life that is around us in the summer,” Doane said. His sonata was inspired by Bach and that composer’s unfurling of progressive compositional ideas, but the tonality and fondness for odd meter were Doane’s own voice. His virtuosic playing and obvious command of his instrument was always in the service of grand, thrilling musical gestures.
He next performed the fiendishly difficult and wildly entertaining Caprice no. 24, by Niccolò Paganini. “It shows Paganini in all of his inventiveness,” Doane said of the piece. In “really pushing the technical limits of the violin,” through his playing and composition, Paganini created his era’s version of a hit. Composers who heard it wrote their own variations on Paganini’s theme, so “it’s probably familiar to you,” he said. In playing the piece, Doane showed the same approach as he had to his own composition. The work to learn the piece was all behind him; Doane made the piece feel effortless, like flying, swooping, soaring, pirouetting.
The Haven String Quartet — Yaira Matyakubova and Gregory Tompkins on violins, Annalisa Boerner on viola, and Philip Boulanger on cello — opened its segment of the concert by offering a glimpse behind the curtain — showing a short video of the quartet figuring out which bowings to use in a certain passage of the music, to create a unified voice and achieve the desired emotional effect. It was also taking advantage of the format of the prerecorded concert.
“We now have this ability to show our process,” Matyakubova explained. “We get to expand our visual range” And “we get to share them all over the world.” It also let the quartet members share some thoughts about the piece they were playing, Samuel Barber’s String Quartet in B Minor, Op. 11. For all its technical challenges, “it never loses its accessibility or its human element,” Boulanger said. “You’re left with a piece that feels incredibly true and beautiful.”
For the string quartet members, it also spoke to the moment we’re in. “So many of us are missing connections with our community right now,” Tompkins said. A virtual concert was “still not the same, but we are so grateful to be able to share the music.”
The first movement opened with bold, declarative statements before settling into a shifting, nervous energy that opened into something more frantic, then took a left turn into the lyrical. The composer’s equal facility with moments of grinding dissonance and choral beauty were on display. The quartet then settled into the quartet’s second — and world famous — movement. These days it’s usually heard played by a full orchestra. Having only one instrument on each of the composition’s parts gave the piece an aching austerity that effectively reintroduced it. As a smaller, more nimble group, the quartet could also attend to the movement of each phrase, giving the music an undeniable pulse and creating space for each voice room to breathe.
“I love hearing the original version of this,” one audience member said in the chat box. “The string orchestra version is beautiful, but there is something so special and raw about the string quartet version.”
“So great,” agreed another audience member. “Good thing about an internet concert is that no one gets mad as I clap between movements.”
But in this performance, there was suddenly no time to clap, as the quartet moved directly and savvily into piece’s startling third movement. They returning to the emotional space of the first movement, ending strong.
The concert then moved to a question-and-answer session with all of the performers, which more than half of the virtual audience stuck around for. A few audience members asked Doane about his composition process. “I spit out what I end up listening to,” Doane said. The summer of 2020, he was listening to a lot of Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Bach. He was particularly inspired by Bach and “how he encapsulated his ideas into something that’s attainable on the instrument,” Doane said. He wanted to create a similar effect of “several voices happening at once on the violin.”
Doane also said that he composed first by playing violin and listening back to his ideas, ”seeing if there’s anything worth developing. Usually not,” he added, with a laugh. If an idea did catch his ear, he then switched instruments, noting that it was “easier to work on the construction process on the piano.”
One audience member asked him how long it took to memorize and “perfect” the Paganini.
“I don’t know about ‘perfect,’ but ‘memorize’ — I think I started working on it when I was a teenager,” Doane said. “There are several of those variations where I have to practice it two hours a day to be able to play it later” that same day. Even after lots of practicing, in terms of hours and years, still, “some of it is a leap of faith.”
Paganini was “really a rock star in his generation,” Doane added. The composer took on “stories of the devil incarnate and made it a part of his stage persona, and really blew people’s minds.” Doane felt at times like an actor; “you take on this larger-than-life persona when you play his music.”
Several audience members had questions about that famous second movement of the Barber quartet. “The Adagio has been written for string orchestra and full orchestra — some with Barber’s blessing, some without,” Boulanger said. Tompkins added that the first time he’d heard the piece, it had been set for a choir.
“There is an incredible intimacy that you get in the quartet version that you don’t get in a bigger setting. It feels much more personal,” Boulanger said. This made it also more emotional to play — especially in creating a prerecorded concert. “You really want to leave it all on the field every time,” he said. “It can be exhausting in the best way.” Boulanger also said that performing the Adagio as part of the full string quartet changed his relationship to it. There was a sense of being pulled into the Adagio and then back out of it again. “This is how Barber imagined that music in the first place,” he said. Matyakubova mentioned that, though the Adagio has become a part of the American musical landscape, it was important to remember that Barber — then in his 20s — was making a bold statement in the 1930s when he wrote it. “Nobody wrote melodies. It was so not in style,” she said. Classical composers instead tilted toward atonality and serial music. “For Barber to write this piece was a very daring move.”
Boerner mentioned that she’d first played the Adagio in a high-school orchestra and “I was so afraid of that top note,” she recalled. As she developed as a performer, it was interesting to revisit the piece again and again. With the Haven String Quartet, “for the first time I felt at home with that shift in the hand,” she said.
The Francisco-Perez sisters were asked how it was to play and work on a piece together during quarantine. They noted that “we learned so many extra skills” — from musical technique to learning how to use the technology to make a virtual concert. “Making the video is one thing and then getting the video to you taught us new things,” Jocelyn said.
Tompkins said that the sisters seemed to really enjoy playing music together. “You smiled the whole time,” he said.
“Maybe a little too much,” Jocelyn said.
“No such thing,” Tompkins said.
The next Album Drop will take place in March. Visit Music Haven’s website to learn more about what it does, sign up for lessons, or get involved.
