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Miro Quartet's Daniel Ching chats about new recording 'Home' with 89.5KMFA - Austin

Interview with KMFA - Staccato

The Miró Quartet presents Home, a new album that explores the many concepts of what the term “home” can mean. Its complexity is woven in a variety of ways into the music: the pieces, all composed by Americans past and present, invite you to feel, reflect, and engage in Miró’s world. In this regard, the album also represents the United States, Miró’s artistic home, in many ways. The program presents two new commissions by Kevin Puts and Caroline Shaw, as well as known and lesser known works by George Walker and Samuel Barber.

This is the Miró Quartet’s second album on Pentatone, following their recording of Beethoven’s Complete String Quartets (2019).

“The Miró Quartet is so excited to be releasing our new album ‘Home’. This album is the culmination of a long and creative process of discovery, exploring our relationships with living composers as well as exploring and recording the existing core repertoire of American string quartet music. It has been an exciting musical journey that ultimately has brought us home as musicians in a new and special way.” - The Miró Quartet

Excerpts from the liner notes: “We all have a home on this planet, and yet no matter how settled and comfortable it may be, aren’t all of us in a sense ever in search of our “true home”, however we define that individually?

Home represents stability and safety, yet human life is a journey of constant change, acquisition and loss, a journey traveling away from our origins, and hopefully onwards towards our goals, our true home.

The United States has been our physical and cultural home for our entire career as a quartet, and obviously the four works included here are all by US citizens both past and present, coincidentally all Pulitzer Prize Winners. Great works such as the Barber “Adagio” have been part of the musical context of our lives since we started listening to music, while works such as the second movement of George Walker’s first string quartet, more famously known as “Lyric for Strings”, a piece the Miró Quartet regretfully did not know until more recently, represent the powerful but sometimes unacknowledged threads that often run deeply through our lives at home. Kevin Puts and Caroline Shaw are friends whom we know well and are both valued parts of our personal and artistic lives, and the string quartets they wrote for us certainly feel like “home” to us: their sound worlds are a familiar and beloved musical space that we feel comfortable inhabiting, a sonic structure that reflects the concerns and values that we four as people care and worry about, both as we make music together and as we go about our lives in this challenging home world that we all share.”


A Love Letter To Home, Wherever It May Be

89.5KMFA - Austin's Judlyne Lilly-Gibson writes……There’s no place like home.  A familiar line from a familiar movie and so very true.  The Miro Quartet, UT’s Faculty String Quartet In Residence with an international reputation and a Grammy nomination, honed in on the theme with their latest album Home. They illustrated the essence of Home with a video of their performance of Over The Rainbow.

Daniel Ching, one of the founding members of the group says Home is a love letter to and appreciation of all the things they call home. 
 

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