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Miro Quartet opens Cooperstown Summer Music Festival / WSKG's 'Arts In Depth' chats w/Miro violinist Will Fedkenheuer

The Miró Quartet recently released: 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.

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.

Miro writes…..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.”
 

Here's the album's TRACK LIST

Kevin Puts (b. 1972)
Home
1 Warm, with rubato -
2 Faster, refreshed -
3 Dangerously fast

George Walker (1922-2018)
Quartet No. 1
4 II. Molto adagio

Caroline Shaw (b. 1982)
Microfictions [volume 1]
5 I. Under the hot sun…
6 II. The photographs smeared…
7 III. The summer storm laughed…
8 III & 1/2. Between the third and fourth...
9 IV. The complete taxonomy…
10 V. Waking up on the early side…
11 VI. The mountains folded in…

Samuel Barber (1910-1981)
String Quartet in B minor, Op. 11
12 I. Molto allegro e appassionato
13 II. Molto adagio
14 III. Molto allegro (come prima) - Presto

Harold Arlen (1905-1986)
15 Over the Rainbow (arr. by William Ryden)
 

WSKG's Bill Snyder writes…The Cooperstown Summer Music Festival opens its season with a program by the Miro Quartet called "Voices of Home". We hear from violinist Will Fedkenheuer about the remarkable program that ranges from a quartet by Haydn to 20th and 21st century works. Voices of Home is on Thursday, July 18, 2024 - 7:00 PM 9:00 PM. Here's the program

The Farmers' Museum
Microfictions [volume 1] by Caroline ShawLyric by George Walker
Home by Kevin Puts
String Quartet, op. 77, No. 1 by Joseph Haydn

The Miró Quartet is Daniel Ching violin William Fedkenheuer violin John Largess viola Joshua Gindele cello

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