After an absence of almost five years, the Miro String Quartet returns to Hamilton this Sunday afternoon to whip up a musical smorgasbord.Their regale will include an entire second half made up of quartet movements a la carte.

The Miro’s musical menu will list various movements by composers such as Haydn, Schubert, Beethoven, Brahms, Dvorak, Smetana, Ives, Bartok, and others. Patrons at their Hamilton Conservatory concert will choose which movements they’d like to hear via a ballot in their program booklet. These ballots will be tabulated, and the four or five movements receiving the most votes will be served up after intermission.

It’s all part of the Miro’s goal to engage its audience in the product onstage. Which is all fine and dandy. But who or what can ensure that this doesn’t devolve into a dog’s breakfast of quartet movements with no stylistic relation to each other?

“We’ve very much carefully chosen the movements we have (a la carte), ” said cellist Joshua Gindele, reached on his cellphone last week while walking his dog near his home in Austin, Texas, where the Miros are based. “We can almost predict fairly well what the last part of the concert is going to consist of. But every audience is different.”

The first half will be dished out table d’hote, so to speak, and includes Samuel Barber’s String Quartet with its famous Adagio.

The concert will begin with the opening and final three movements of Haydn’s Seven Last Words of our Saviour on the Cross, a piece originally composed for orchestra but later arranged for string quartet.

The translated title is a bit of a misnomer. Those “Words, ” or rather “Worte” in Haydn’s original German title, are best rendered as “sayings” or “quotations.” The sayings were culled from the Biblical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Haydn gave each saying a separate movement, and placed the applicable quotation in Latin translation underneath the opening notes of the first violin’s part. As such, they look like lyrics. But having the first violinist sing them wasn’t Haydn’s intent. The quotations merely serve as a departure point for Haydn’s musical commentary on Jesus’ sayings.

The Miros have been including this work in their concerts over the past year. At times, they’ve done it with a narrator or a minister speaking the sayings. At other times, they’ve done it with a Trinidadian slam poet. For their Chamber Music Hamilton concert, they’re not sure how they’ll treat these sayings.

“My violist (John Largess) is a Latin and Greek scholar and former archeologist (who studied at Hebrew University in Israel), ” said Gindele. “So, if you want it in Latin or Greek, or really any ancient language, I think he can do it.” Sounds like the perfect opportunity to hear them in Aramaic, widely considered Jesus’s mother tongue.

While the work has overt Christian ties, Gindele denies that the Miros are making a religious statement by performing it.

“No, no, no, ” emphasized Gindele. “It’s music that deserves to be performed. It doesn’t get its due … It really is great music. We felt that it needed a little attention.”

On Monday, the Miros will be turning their attention to a school concert they’re giving in the auditorium at Westdale Secondary, 700 Main St. W. The one-hour concert begins at 1 p.m. and is geared for students aged nine to 18. Cost is $2 per person. For info, contact Carol at 905-528-0763.

This Sunday at 3 p.m., organists Paul Grimwood and Brent Fifield perform Bach and Franck at Central Presbyterian, 165 Charlton Ave. W. Free-will offering.

Next Friday, March 5 at 8 p.m., Triple Forte, that Canadian powerhouse trio of violinist Jasper Wood, cellist Yegor Dyachkov, and pianist David Jalbert, perform at McMaster’s Con Hall. Tickets: $17, senior $12, student $5. Call 905-525-9140, ext. 24246.

Leonard Turnevicius writes about classical music for The Hamilton Spectator.

http://www.thespec.com/article/728232

Carrying a string quartet in your pocket has never been easier.

The Miro Quartet became the first string quartet with an iPhone application in October. The app helps fans stay up to date on the quartet with posts from its Web site, Facebook and Twitter. It also links to performance videos and the group’s recordings, including the recent “The Miro Quartet Live!”

Chamber music enthusiasts, however, won’t have to rely on the tiny iPhone to hear the quartet. Syracuse Friends of Chamber Music host the quartet Saturday at Lincoln Middle School.

Violinists Daniel Ching and Sandy Yamamoto, violist John Largess and cellist Joshua Gindele will perform Schubert’s String Quartet No. 15 in G Major and Beethoven’s Opus 130.

Such traditional pieces may seem to run counter to the quartet’s reputation for being unconventional. In 2001, the classical musicians rafted down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in Arizona and performed on riverbanks as part of the Grand Canyon Music Festival. But, in Syracuse, they won’t be playing ordinary Beethoven. The group eliminates the last movement of Opus 130, an allegro, in favor of the original ending — a fugue, also known as Opus 133. Beethoven’s publisher thought it was too progressive for audiences when it was written in the 1820s.

The quartet doesn’t just play “meat and potatoes” composers like Beethoven, Brahms and Schubert, Gindele said in a recent phone interview. His colleagues’ interests vary from new music to Haydn. Yet, their different tastes do not make agreeing on concert programs difficult.

“There is so much great music for the string quartet, we’re never going to run out,” he said of the quartet, which was formed at Oberlin College’s Music Conservatory in 1995. “There’s always something interesting in what my colleagues have interest in playing. There’s no reason to argue about it.”

The Miro Quartet’s harmony on and off stage is rare. Gindele said quartets have a reputation for “tumultuous” relationships because players tend to strong willed.

“Even though we have completely different concepts of how that music is supposed to go,” he said, “there’s synergy between different musical personalities getting along.”

Currently, in residence at the University of Texas at Austin, the Miro Quartet continues to distinguish itself in the classical world with its iPhone app and social networking sites.

“It’s the future of marketing,” Gindele said. “We’re not doing anything that people in the pop world haven’t been doing for a long time.”

The details
What: The Miro Quartet, presented by Syracuse Friends of Chamber Music.
Where: Lincoln Middle School, 1613 James St., Syracuse.
When: 8 p.m. Saturday.
Tickets: $20; senior, $15; student, $10. Available at the door.