Eloquence doesn’t get much play in the age of the sound bite. We’re so wired for speed and informality that in most communication, a bluntness of expression holds sway. But in Bates Recital Hall last Friday, the Miró Quartet and pianist Anton Nel proved there are still places where thoughts are composed and conveyed with craft, where time is allowed for a range of feelings to be explored and for fine distinctions to be drawn.

In the first movement of Edward Elgar’s Quintet for Piano and Strings in A Minor, they alternated passages of dramatic conflict – a pursuit that escalated from the furtive shadowing of a stalker to a breathless chase, with the strings racing away from Nel’s relentless, commanding piano – with others of wistful nostalgia: the piano and strings joined in a dance of yearning, twirling about a history shared and lost. A beautifully layered tension within and between these sections caught the pull between past and present, action and reflection, and it was sustained through the subsequent sections as Elgar wound through melancholic musings, sweeping emotional declarations, delicate reveries, and movements charged with purpose and resolve. Throughout, all five musicians remained remarkably attuned to one another, each instrument shifting from background to foreground like quicksilver, keeping you constantly aware of all five and how they were interwoven into the fabric of the music.

This craftsmanship and care was no less evident when the Miró Quartet performed alone. Playing the Samuel Barber String Quartet‘s familiar “Adagio” – yes, that heartwrenching music from Platoon – the ensemble refused to milk the elegiac score for easy pathos; its restraint kept the work’s deeply felt grief honest, its emotion earned. Shifting from darkness to light with Antonín Dvoràk’s “American” String Quartet, the four indulged their romantic sides, coloring the optimistic and animated score with fervent flourishes. They also demonstrated a deep sense of unity, ending the contemplative “Lento” on a long note that exquisitely faded into silence and moving the “Molto vivace” forward with the even, steady propulsion of a mechanical engine. With second violin William Fedkenheuer still in his first year, the Miró may be still refining its sound. But this first concert of 2012 showed the ensemble’s voice to be considered, articulate, expressive, and nuanced – in short, eloquent.

Will Fedkenheuer welcomes the midafternoon jolt of caffeine that a cappuccino at Thrice Cafe brings him.

In November, Fedkenheuer and his wife welcomed their second son, Oliver. Between their newborn and their 23-month-old son, Max, sleep is in short supply for Fedkenheuer and his wife.

Happiness is not, though.

Fedkenheuer is the second violinist of the Miró Quartet.

“There’s so much fun in what we get to do,” he says, genuinely relaxed and cheerful.

The Miró plays Friday night at Bates Recital Hall in a program that includes a guest appearance by pianist Anton Nel.

It’s just the fourth time Austin audiences will have had the chance to see Fedkenheuer. He joined the Miró — which has been the string quartet-in-residence at the University of Texas’ Butler School of Music since 2003 — in August.

Fedkenheuer stepped into the position once occupied by Sandra Yamamoto, who left to have more time with her family. (Yamamoto is the wife of Miró Quartet first violinist Daniel Ching, and the couple has two sons.)

The now high-profile internationally touring quartet was formed in 1995 when its members were undergraduates at Oberlin Conservatory.

Fedkenheuer is the first new member to the Miró since its beginnings. (The quartet also includes violist John Largess and cellist Josh Gindele.)

Is it daunting, joining such an ensemble, one that’s been together for so long?

“They took a great deal of care in the audition process and were very thoughtful,” says Fedkenheuer. “There’s a learning curve for all of us. Everything is new to everyone.”

Though everyone is not necessarily new to everyone else.

In the small world of high-caliber string quartet players, Fedkenheuer and the Miró have known each other for years, literally. As teenagers, he and Ching even spent a summer at music camp in Maine. (Fedkenheuer mentioned something about a dorm-damaging water fight he and Ching were involved with, but didn’t elaborate.)

“It’s important to take an interest in what’s going on in their lives,” says Fedkenheuer of his fellow string players. “And you have to know how to integrate life outside the quartet with (life in it). It does take a lot of patience and maturity.”

Group happiness, for example, depends entirely on each individual’s happiness.

“It’s a democracy that doesn’t always follow all the rules of a democracy,” Fedkenheuer says of quartet dynamics. “If one person is really unhappy with something, then we’ll change it. I have a say in how my voice sounds in the quartet.”

Fedkenheuer hadn’t been looking for a change when the Miró came calling late last spring. He was content as the first violinist of the Fry Street Quartet and on the faculty of the Caine College of the Arts at Utah State University. After all, the fly-fishing — a favorite pastime of Fedkenheuer’s — was great in the mountains of Utah.

But Texas wasn’t exactly the unknown frontier, either. After growing up in Calgary — with its petroleum industry and cowboy culture, Alberta is often called the “Texas of Canada” — Fedkenheuer studied at Rice University in Houston for his undergraduate degree.

At his Austin debut concert with the Miró in September, Fedkenheuer surprised with some Texas-esque (Alberta-esque?) talent when he broke into “Orange Blossom Special,” aka the fiddler’s anthem.

Yep, Fedkenheuer is a fiddler. At least, he started his career as such.

Learning violin at age 4 by the Suzuki method, he was by age 7 plucked to join the Calgary Fiddlers, a professional youth touring group.

“The first concert I was invited to play on was at Disneyland,” he recalls. “That kind of sealed the deal for me.”

For the next seven years, Fedkenheuer toured the world with the Calgary Fiddlers, racking up a considerable amount of show business chops along way.

Though professionally it’s all about the classical repertoire for him now, Fedkenheuer says the fiddling is never all that far away. “It’s something I’ll often pull out on my own.”

Among other projects on the docket for the Miró is a mid-May recording of Beethoven’s Op. 59 quartets. The CD will be released in the fall, a prelude, as it were, for the foursome’s plans to tackle the entire cycle of Beethoven string quartets in the 2013-2014 season.

“The Beethoven cycle is really kind of rite of passage for a string quartet,” says Fedkenheuer. “And we really wanted to focus on the core repertoire.”

In the meantime, in June there’s a gig at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall with Yo-Yo Ma and the New York Philharmonic. And next year, the Miró plays Carnegie Hall. Before that, among many other projects, the quartet will premiere at UT an octet with the Shanghai Quartet by Austin composer Dan Welcher. Then there’s a concert at the Library of Congress for which the quartet will use Stradivarius instruments from the library’s collection.

“It’s all good,” says Fedkenheuer of the hectic professional schedule.

Perhaps the midafternoon caffeine break will become standard repertoire, too.

The Cleveland Chamber Music Society goes out its way to make sure that chamber music is alive and well in Northeast Ohio. It imports many of the finest artists in the field and reveals the wonders of the art to local children.

The society’s concert Tuesday at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights neatly summarized its mission. The night began with a salute to Annie Fullard, a faculty member at the Cleveland Institute of Music and first violinist of the Cavani String Quartet, who was honored for her work as artistic director of the society’s School Outreach Program.

Then it was time for music played on a lofty level. The guest ensemble was the Miro Quartet, which was founded at Oberlin College in 1995 and now serves as string quartet-in-residence at the University of Texas at Austin.

Throughout the concert, the Miro gave lessons in the art of the string quartet, shaping each of the night’s scores with a blend of refinement and vibrancy that drew the listener deeply inside the sonic arguments.

What a remarkable ensemble the Miro is. First violinist Daniel Ching is an artist of prodigious gifts who treats every musical moment as a crucial event. His expressive subtlety and fire are matched by second violinist William Fedkenheuer (the newest member), violist John Largess and cellist Joshua Gindele.

Their exceptional interaction benefited the varied demands of the program’s repertoire, which was almost a history of the string quartet. The night began with the so-called father of the genre, Haydn, whose String Quartet in E-flat major, Op. 33, No. 2, is subtitled “The Joke.”

The punchline doesn’t arrive until the finale, when the music often stops dead in its tracks and takes a big breath before moving on. Prior to this mirth, Haydn is his usual warm-hearted and engaging self, with genial and surprising turns of phrase and harmony that give way to darker implications.

Violist Largess prepared the audience for Philip Glass’ String Quartet No. 5 with remarks that suggested the 1991 score is a challenging experience. But the piece, touched by Glass’ trademark minimalist style, unfolds with intriguing and even poignant approachability.

Accessible doesn’t mean simple, and the Miro players were quick to emphasize the tensions in the repeated figures and contemplative writing. They shaped the swirling rhythmic motives as vividly as they kept the narrative in forward motion.

Brahms’ String Quartet in C minor, Op. 51, No. 1, is an opportunity for an ensemble to go to Romantic excess, but the Miro avoided the temptation. Instead, the musicians placed the score’s warmth and vigor in the most lucid contexts.

As if these stellar performances weren’t enough, the Miro bade farewell with a transcendent encore, the Cavatina from Beethoven’s Quartet in B-flat major, Op. 130, which received tender, luminous shading.

To read the review in its entirety, please click here.

Perhaps it’s a testament to the energy of their performances that concert promoters and critics still like to tag the Austin, Texas-based Miró Quartet as an “emerging young ensemble.”

The group has been active since 1995, and it has had the same membership for most of that period (its fees have gone up, one would assume). The quartet recently experienced its first personnel change since 1997, as second violinist Sandy Yamamoto left in order to spend more time with her two young children, and William Fedkenheuer, a former member of the Borromeo String Quartet, was hired in July after a nine-month search.

The members of the foursome – who also include violinist Daniel Ching, violist John Largess and cellist Joshua Gindele – are in their 30s. By the standards of classical music, that is young. But Gindele notes that there’s nothing like late Beethoven to make a string player ponder age.

“I don’t know why – maybe it’s just because I’m getting grayer. I find more sadness and less anxiety in the work,” said Gindele, after a performance of the first movement of Beethoven’s Quartet Op. 132 in the WQXR Café. “With the first movement I used to have the idea that it was a little bit anxious and there was a constant tension. Now I feel like it’s a little more settled and a little more back in its chair and a little more espressivo instead of driven.”

Gindele adds that Beethoven himself “was definitely facing his own mortality at this point. He had a horrible intestinal illness that he did not think he was going to recover from.”

The other members of the Miró agree that the Op. 132 carries a certain weight of time. “All these late quartets are truly autobiographical but in some ways this one has more of a personal message,” said Ching. “I feel like Op. 132 is really driven by something emotional – by what he felt like he had to get out.”

Beethoven composed the work in 1825, as his own deafness had thoroughly advanced two years before his death. Some credit this quartet as T. S. Eliot’s impetus to write his poem cycle Four Quartets. In a letter, the author envisioned the piece as “the fruit of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering,” adding, “I should like to get something of that into verse before I die.”

This week at Lincoln Center, the Miró performs Op. 132 preceded by a 75-minute dramatic recitation of Four Quartets by the English actor Stephen Dillane, done from memory. Fedkenheuer, the new violinist, is unable to attend the performances due to a family obligation and violinist Tereza Stanislav is filling in. Nevertheless, the quartet is familiar with the production, having performed it at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in 2009. “It’s easier to grasp a long, complicated, somewhat heavy poem when you both have something non-verbal afterwards,” said Largess.

Click here to watch a video from the performance.

It’s time to look at the Miro Quartet in a new light. The departure of Sandy Yamamoto as second violinist is a natural point of transition for the ensemble, but as they opened the Austin Chamber Music Festival on Friday night at the Bates Recital Hall, the Miro seemed transformed — sort of basking in the glow of music that resonated deep in their bones.

Cellist Joshua Gindele hardly gave his score a glance all night, preferring instead to meet eyes with the rest of the ensemble, urging them on with his shoulders or a tilt of his head.

First violin Daniel Ching was basically on fire. High vibratos were heartbreaking, and delicate harmonics were like glass.

Composer Kevin Puts’ “Credo” was commissioned for the Miro in 2007, when they sought a work that would emphasize something positive about America during that difficult era.

Puts’ music brings a violin shop to life, paints a picture of America’s buildings and bridges, and recalls the beliefs and hopes that formed the backbone of this nation.

Its opening chord was achingly beautiful. As the quartet inhabited a luthier’s shop, it was exactly the sound you’d imagine from roomful of violins, could they speak.

Next was Michael Torke’s “Mojave,” with Tom Burritt on marimba. It didn’t seem to swing as it had earlier this year, but this homage to the desert was still entrancing.

In an evening of superlative performances, Philip Glass’ “String Quartet No. 5” was the masterstroke.

The 1991 work defies Glass’ reputation as a repetitive, and as minimalist, for that matter. With its ever present pulse, it groups little thoughts on top of hypnotically pretty passages, then releases, with heart-stopping chords, pulled out in great unified strokes by the Miro.

Ching, again, played several gorgeous solos. But the Miro as a whole had a determined charisma in their movements, pushing each other forward.

This was the Miro at the top of their form. Tereza Stanislav filled in nicely at second violin, as the Miro continues to search for its new member.

In the meantime, the ensemble revels in this carefree confidence that is breathing new life into their work, and inducing ever more chills in concertgoers.

Luke Quinton is an American-Statesman freelance arts critic.

To read the review in its entirety, please click here.

String quartets usually don’t move one to tears. This one did. The sublime Dvorák selection was the last full quartet played by second violinist Sandy Yamamoto with the Miró Quartet, the treasured ensemble at the University of Texas.

Before the Dvorák, Yamamoto talked about her 15 years with violist John Largess, cellist Joshua Gindele and first violinist and husband Daniel Ching. A handkerchief helped staunch the tears as she described the process for picking the piece — she asked the other musicians what they wanted to play with her — and just how she fell in love with any quartet’s “inner voices.”

I suspect everyone in Bates Hall on Sunday afternoon listened mostly closely to the somber second-violin part. When done, the audience rose as one. Five bouquets of vivd flowers were marched up on stage. One was delivered by her tiny elder son, who was carrying a smart phone. When her younger son, a baby, was spirited away from the stage, he started wailing.

“That’s one reason I’m quitting,” cracked Yamamoto. “He’s never heard me perform before. Maybe he didn’t like it.”

As she introduced the encore — one slow movement from a Haydn quartet — Yamamoto stopped. “You’re going to have to put that phone up,” she said to her elder son before stepping off the stage to confiscate the electronic entertainer. “This is another reason I’m quitting.”

(Earlier in the evening, Julie Landsman and Tereza Stanilsav joined part of the Miró for the Schuller Quintet for Horn and String Quartet; then the Aeolus Quartet, UT’s pre-professional ensemble in residence, teamed up with the Miró for Mendelssohn’s Octet for Strings in E-Flat Major, a familiar piece that one rarely enjoys live.)

Following the concert, 100 or so Yamamoto admirers convened at Suzi’s Chinese Kitchen on Bee Caves Road. Mingling in pods were a Who’s Who of classical music backers and doers in Austin: Teresa and Joe Long, Gail and Jeff Kodosky, Sarah and Ernest Butler, Anton Nel and Dr. Bill Jones, Richard Hartgrove and Gary Cooper, Butler School of Music director Glenn Chandler. The list goes on.

More honors fell to Yamamoto over family-style food: A trophy, a framed tribute, speeches, more tears. I spoke to Hartgrove for a long time about the fiscal condition of Austin Lyric Opera. He made me worried and yet hopeful. Anyone who wants to keep a major opera company in Austin should pay attention to its current needs.

Meanwhile, the Miró continues its search for a new second violinist and we can bid Yamamoto a fond farewell with thanks for years of gorgeous “inner voices.”

The Miró Quartet is losing its rock.

Second violinist Sandy Yamamoto, who’s been with the ensemble for 15 of its 16 years, will play her last concert as a member this Sunday, May 8. With one son about to start kindergarten and another turning 2, Yamamoto and husband Daniel Ching, Miró’s first violinist, decided they wanted to give the boys “a little more stability” and have one parent home with them all the time. The prospect of missing out on her sons’ childhood years may be the only thing that could pull Yamamoto away from a job she loves as much as her Miró gig. “It was a now-or-never kind of thing,” she says. “I don’t think I would have this kind of courage to step away ever again.”

Imagining the quartet without Yamamoto’s blazing passion and strength – her colleagues have told her that she’s their rock – may be hard for Miró devotees, but they can take comfort in knowing that she’ll remain in Austin and still make music. She will continue to teach violin at the University of Texas’ Butler School of Music, where Miró has been the string quartet in residence since 2007, and will play violin in recitals on her own and with other musicians – maybe even as a guest artist with the Miró Quartet, she jokes. Here, Yamamoto discusses leaving the quartet and programming her farewell concert.

Sandy Yamamoto: It’s definitely bittersweet, and there are moments when I question: “Did I do the right thing?” We’ve been rehearsing this week for our concert coming up, and I realized how much playing in this group meant to me. There’s something amazing about being surrounded by three very inspiring musicians, and I get so much out of it. I’m going to miss it so much, but I’m very thankful for the 15 years that I had with them, making great music. I had a great time.

Austin Chronicle: How was the program for your final performance selected?

SY: I had played all the fall concerts, but the February concert [the other members] played with someone they were auditioning. This last concert, though, I really wanted to play, because the one thing that was programmed was the Mendelssohn Octet with the Aeolus Quartet, our student group. I really wanted to play that with my group and with them, because we’ve spent two years so closely mentoring them, and one of the violinists is my student. I also wanted a last time to play quartets with my colleagues. At first, my colleagues said, “Why don’t you pick something that you really want to play?” So I thought about this for at least a month, but it was almost impossible because every time I started thinking about what I wanted to play, it made it more sad and nostalgic, and I just couldn’t decide. So I said, “Why don’t you guys come up some pieces that you really want to play with me?” So the guys all came up with two or three pieces, and the Dvorák A-flat Quartet was the common thread in all the guys’ choices. It’s a wonderful piece, and it’s a pretty nice second violin part, which is cool. It’s actually a very appropriate piece, because it’s one of the pieces that really made me want to play second violin. I’m just glad that we’re playing something that everyone wanted to play.

It’s funny, I don’t think we really ever discuss things like, “Oh, we all want to play this.” In that regard, this is kind of special. It’s one of the pieces we all want to play.

To read the full article, click here.

Composer Steve Reich cast a long shadow over Thursday’s Terrace Theater recital by percussionist Colin Currie and the Miro Quartet. Reich’s own piece, “Nagoya Marimbas” — which had Currie playing a live, mirror-image marimba part half a beat behind a recorded marimba solo — offered classic Reichian minimalism in its repetitive rhythmic cells and pointillist bursts of color. Next to that piece, if Michael Torke’s chamber-scaled concerto for marimba and string quartet, “Mojave,” sounded like Reich-lite, the comparison didn’t diminish the work’s breezy charms, where a blend of looser-limbed minimalism and feel-good neo-romanticism evoked the desert car trips Torke regularly takes between Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

Steve Martland counts Reich as an influence on his own music, and his piece “Starry Night” put the Miro strings through their paces in writing that sounded as if furious, Paganini-like virtuoso riffs were locked into some sort of tape loop and then broken into repeated melodic shards cut off by fraught silences. The expanding and contracting rhythmic figures in Louis Andriessen’s witty and fiendishly difficult work for wood blocks and marimba, “Woodpecker” (played dazzlingly by Currie) , brought Reich’s early percussion pieces to mind. Dave Maric’s “Run Chime” filtered Reich’s perpetual-motion-machine style through a progressive jazz lens.

Even the moodily dissonant score “Since Brass, nor Stone . . . ” by the anything-but-Reichian modernist Alexander Goehr, featured obsessively repeated phrases on a battery of percussion instruments. And, thanks to the Miro’s lean, febrile readings of Schubert’s “Quartettsatz” and Barber’s Adagio for Strings, we managed to hear proto-minimalist leanings in these decidedly old-world scores.

To read the article in its entirety, please click here.

Sonority, the quality of sound, is a captivating business for those willing to experiment with it, especially in the case of instruments working together in seemingly new combinations.

“It’s interesting and unusual,” said cellist Joshua Gindele. “It’s not something people would have heard before, which is kind of exciting.”

Gindele is part of the Miro Quartet, one of America’s highest-profile chamber groups. At work here is their brilliant pairing with the classical percussionist Colin Curie, a man known for his versatility and dramatic intensity. The sonority created by the five is presented at Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theatre in a repertoire that is both standard and experimental.

Along with Gindele, quartet members Daniel Ching and Tereza Stanislav on violins, and John Largess playing viola add their flair. Stanislav is substituting for the original violinist, Sandy Yamamoto, currently on a leave of absence.

No strangers to musical collaboration, both the quartet and Currie have established a reputation for charismatic performances. The five players made their joint debut in February at the University of Texas at Austin where the quartet members serve as artists-in-residence.

“I have to admit, I was a little nervous about the combination,” Gindele continued. “[Currie] is such a spectacular player and the repertoire is a little unusual and challenging to learn, but it definitely [went] over well. There’s something very compelling visually about a percussionist flinging mallets all over the place, from marimbas to percussion across the board.”

Schubert’s Quartet for Strings No. 12 is the show opener, followed by a Steven Reich piece, “Nagoya Marimbas,” a percussion solo. The musicians come together for a finale by Steve Martland titled “Starry Night,” a minimalist piece and one that Gindele refers to as “a tough one.”

“It’s a very driving and intense piece that demands an enormous amount of focus and energy from the players, which is why we’re ending with it,” he said.

That the Miro Quartet enjoys the best of both worlds given the variety of music written for the strings is obvious.

“The concert is going to appeal to a slightly more progressive audience,” Gindele said. “It’s going to be relaxed and fun; a real feast for people’s ears.”

The latest theory on why Mozart was his singular self sounds suspiciously facile: Now, according to some medical experts, it seems the great genius was bipolar. Well, who isn’t?

Whether or not pianist Shai Wosner subscribes to that idea, he began his concert with the Miro Quartet on Friday with a solo piano work, the Fantasy in C minor, K. 475 – one of the darker, crunchier pieces Mozart wrote – in a performance that went convincingly to more extremes than usual (and not just to block out a noisy hearing aid in the audience). Fine gradations of intensity, touch, and nuance were everywhere in this unusual start to a provocatively unorthodox Philadelphia Chamber Music Society program at the Kimmel Center.

The Fantasy‘s counterpoint and sense of simultaneous music events were a logical bridge to three Bach pieces adapted by Mozart – unconvincingly – for string trio. Bach’s counterpoint was muddied, but its strength of purpose kept Mozart from asserting his own personality. It said much about what Mozart is not. Bach found God in the mechanics of composition. In Mozart’s secular world, mechanics were subsumed by a larger personal expression, as in the Fantasy.

All of these elements were heard in happier balance in Mozart’s familiar Piano Quartet in E-flat major, K. 493, though the performance didn’t let you slip back into mere enjoyment. The normally graceful passage work had Bach-like toughness in Wosner’s hands. Parts that usually sigh and swoon instead revealed greater underlying musical integrity. The piece’s emotional range wasn’t tempered by surface charm. Mozart shouldn’t always be played this way, but I’m grateful to have heard this.

Wosner is emerging as an increasingly important artist: His excellent debut disc on the Onyx label juxtaposes piano miniatures by Brahms and Schoenberg – who had far more in common than one would think – though with a yielding performance manner that didn’t prepare me for the domineering personality heard Friday in Dvorak’s Piano Quartet, Op. 87.

Not the sort of chamber pianist who envelops his collaborators with warm sonority, Wosner creates something akin to a magnetic field that draws everybody along with brisk, unsentimental tempos and a manner that, in the Dvorak, had an amplitude one associates more with Rachmaninoff. Sometimes, the music was bullied. Writ larger, the piece reveals the composer’s ill-advised decisions to juxtapose palm-court fluffiness to folk-influenced exoticism that sounded almost Middle Eastern. It’s good to get a break from the greatest-hits chamber works, but this one perhaps responds better to coaxing rather than to manhandling.

To read the review in its entirety, please click here.