The Hawaii Concert Society’s second presentation of its 2024-25 season features a string quartet that takes its name from the renowned Dutch graphic artist M. C. Escher and draws inspiration from that artist’s use of individual components working together to form a whole, as any quartet must do in order to succeed.
The Escher String Quartet, hailed by the New York Times for its “passionate elegance and deep feeling,” and currently the quartet-in-residence at New York City’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, will present a concert at 7 p.m. this Wednesday at the University of Hawaii Hilo Performing Arts Center.
The quartet last performed in Hilo in 2013. Now in its 25th season, two of its members, violinist Adam Barnett-Hart and violist Pierre Lapointe, are its co-founders. The other two are cellist Brook Speltz ,who joined nine years ago, and his violinist brother, Brendan, who became a member just five years ago.
It is somewhat unusual for siblings to both be world-class classical musicians, but it helps to have parents who also are musical. In the case of the Speltz brothers, exposure to classical music was immediate. Their father is a cellist and their mother is a violinist.
Brendan Speltz started playing the violin at age 6.
“Our parents would drag us to concerts, their concerts or ones they wanted to see and we’d go kicking and screaming,” he said in a press release. “Probably as a rule, kids don’t want to go to classical concerts. That makes sense because you have to sit there for two hours and listen to a form of music that might not make a lot of sense.”
Eventually their attitudes changed. “Both of us started liking classical music when our parents took us to a string quartet camp in Cape Cod,” he continued. “After our first day playing Haydn and Mozart quartets, something just clicked in our brains, and we became insatiable in our desire to rehearse and play.”
The Hilo concert will open with American composer Samuel Barber’s String Quartet No. 11. It contains the composer’s best-known music, the famous Adagio, often heard at somber events and, as expressed by musicologist Alexander Morin, “rarely leaves a dry eye.“
It will be followed by African-American composer Florence Price’s Quartet No. 2 in A minor. The first black female composer to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra (the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1933), Price’s music combines a rich and romantic symphonic idiom with the melodic intimacy and emotional intensity of African-American spirituals.
The concert will conclude with Antonin Dvorak’s Quartet in A flat major, considered one of his masterpieces.
Tickets for the concert by the Escher String Quartet ($25 general, $20 senior, $10 student) are available at the Most Irresistible Shop, Book, Basically Books, and the UH Hilo Box Office.
Remaining tickets will be available at the door starting at 6:15 p.m.
