Escher String Quartet Play Price, Beethoven

SHANNON ASHER

Festival Focus Writer

The acclaimed Escher String Quartet will return to the Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS) stage for a recital on Thursday evening. “Returning to live music will probably be similar to what a bear feels like after coming out of hibernation,” quartet co-founding member and violist Pierre Lapointe said in a recent interview. “I crave concert opportunities more than before and thankfully my summer season will fulfill this unusually large musical appetite.” The other quartet members are violinists Adam Barnett-Hart and Brendan Speltz and cellist Brook Speltz.

Lapointe continues, “I am also very much looking forward to reconnecting with audiences as the three main people that I have seen during our pandemic were not my quartet colleagues, but my wife and two children. Retrospectively, one major positive outcome from COVID-19 has been for me to spend quality time with my family.”

Taking inspiration from the Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher’s interplay of individual components to form a whole, the Escher String Quartet was formed in 2005, and in 2013 won the Avery Fisher Career Grant. They’ve been championed by the Emerson String Quartet and hailed by Gramophone for their “sheer finesse.”

The program begins with Bartók’s Third String Quartet (1927) followed by Price’s Second String Quartet (1935). Written at about the same time, these two works share similarities in the way they were composed even though they sound quite different. Lapointe explains: “The main element bringing them together is that Bartók and [Florence] Price consciously use folk and dance elements encountered in traditional music from their own respective ethnic groups— Bartók being Hungarian and Price being African-American— in order to infuse different flavors and at the same time strengthen, test, and expand the string quartet genre without sacrificing its essence established long ago by German and Austrian composers.”

The last quartet on the program is Beethoven’s String Quartet in F major, op. 135. “Its longing, solemn, and revelatory third movement might allow us, I hope, to finally come to peace with the fact that so many lives and opportunities were lost during the pandemic,” says Lapointe. “Hopefully our playing that day will allow such a healing process to take place in the hearts of our audience.”

As regular performers and artist-faculty at the AMFS, the quartet members and Lapointe love coming back to Aspen year after year. “The natural setting is beautiful, and no one can argue with that,” Lapointe expresses. “Also, the Center for Advanced Quartet Studies is well run and attracts great ensembles. It is a delight to listen to and advise these younger musicians every year we have had the chance to be here. The concentration of great musicians and great events in one place summer after summer is especially stimulating and invites a sentiment of always being in the right place at the right time.”

Since 2015, Lapointe has taught chamber music at the Southern Methodist University of Dallas and is presently one of its adjunct professors. Generally, Lapointe likes to help students find freedom in their playing, rather telling them what they should or should not do. “I love encouraging the young musicians I hear to showcase their individuality through the prescribed music they are performing, and I like it even more when I see how happy it makes them to do so.”

The Escher String Quartet, whose members serve as artistfaculty for the AMFS’s Center for Advanced Quartet Studies, presents a July 22 recital with works by Bartók, Price, and Beethoven

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