Silicon Valley’s contribution to the advancement of chamber music culture in northern California is evolving with flair in its eighth summer season. Thematic programming, hitherto hazily developed, is acquiring focus, while an increased concentration on the vocal repertoire is adding further lustre to proceedings.

This year, pianist Wu Han and cellist David Finckel, the festival’s founders, have arranged their main-stage concerts around the quest for national identity in music. “The English Voice” proved a game place to start; this profile of a culture awakening from a 200-year musical slumber was instructive. In his 1918 piano quintet, Elgar reluctantly bids farewell to the past and the spectre of Brahms, asserting an individual voice in an adagio that aches with nostalgia for what was. Here, a sensitive pianist, Inon Barnatan, and the bright Miró Quartet stated their case eloquently.

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

It’s one thing to read about the traumatic global upheavals of the mid-20th century, and quite another to hear them expressed as forcefully as they were in the music of Wednesday night’s superb chamber concert at the Music@Menlo Festival.

The program, presented in the Stent Family Hall of the Menlo School in Atherton, comprised two powerful works from 1945 – Britten’s “Holy Sonnets of John Donne” cycle and Richard Strauss’ “Metamorphosen” – as well as Shostakovich’s tormented, autobiographical Eighth String Quartet from 1960. In Wednesday’s first-rate performances, all three served as eloquent testaments of the period.

The great revelation was the Shostakovich, which opened the program in a marvelously sensitive and balanced performance by the Miró Quartet (violinists Daniel Ching and Sandy Yamamoto, violist John Largess and cellist Joshua Gindele). With its obsessive repetitions of the four-note melodic motif that denotes the composer’s initials, this is a piece that in the wrong hands can too often sound hectoring and solipsistic.

But the Miró lavished it with tenderness and delicacy, from the slow Beethovenian fugue that opens the work (rendered with rich, gorgeous tone) to the sardonic but light-footed waltz at its center. Suddenly, a piece whose emotional rawness had often struck me as embarrassing took on an arresting pathos.

Britten’s settings of Donne’s urgent, death-haunted poems – cast with fervent intensity amid a few rhapsodic interludes – got a formidable reading by tenor Matthew Plenk and pianist Ken Noda. Plenk, a young singer affiliated with the Metropolitan Opera, has the bright, piercing tone and flawless diction needed to make this music work, and he shaped the songs with dramatic sureness.

After intermission came a rarity, a mysterious alternate version of “Metamorphosen” scored for seven strings rather than the canonical 23. The septet, premiered in 1994, sustains the same elegiac tone over the destruction of German culture, symbolized by a melodic snippet from the funeral march of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony.

But in packing that material into such a small instrumental space, Strauss necessarily keeps the entire ensemble in motion nearly without pause. The result feels overstuffed in a way that the standard version never does.

Still, the performance caught the music’s contrapuntal dexterity and rhythmic tirelessness, and the ensemble – comprising violinists Jorja Fleezanis and Lily Francis, violists Beth Guterman and Erin Keefe, cellists David Finckel and Ralph Kirshbaum, and bassist Scott Pingel – mustered a plush and evocative sound.

The works paired on the Miró Quartet’s new live recording are sonic travelogues by composers with America on their minds.  Dvořák composed his Quartet in F major, Op 96, while in residence in Spillville, Iowa, in 1893, and gave the piece the apt subtitle “American”.  Kevin Puts’s haunting Credo evokes images that inspired the American composer.

Thematic ties aside, both scores share an intense passion for the material at hand.  Dvořák’s quartet, full of folk references, needs treatment that acknowledges the nostalgic gestures without wallowing in sentimentality.  The Miró players give the work a reading of exceptional vibrancy, warmth and nuance.

Equally affecting is Credo, whose five connected movements salute people and locations that have made indelible impressions on Puts.  The opening movement pays tribute to a violin maker in Katonah, NY, from whose studio is conjured ethereal and fervent musings complete with excerpts from famous violin pieces.

As the music paints pictures of bridges in Pittsburgh, Puts builds motoric, overlapping and rhythmic statements suggesting the “Infrastructure” of the second movement’s title.  The propulsive activity, coloured by string harmonics, is interrupted by an intermezzo, “Learning to Dance”, which sings a lovely song of mother and daughter in tender motion.

The message of peace that lies at the heart of the score is embodied in the final “Credo”, an elegy of sublime beauty not far from the traditions of Beethoven and Mahler.  A more committed or detailed performance than the captivating one the Miró give would be hard to imagine.

From the August 2010 edition of Gramophone.

It was just about a perfect concert for the Minnesota Beethoven Festival.

One of America’s best string quartets playing three Beethoven string quartets.

The Miró Quartet dazzled a crowd Thursday night with marvelous musicianship, technical virtuosity and precise ensemble work. This string quartet is dynamic, passionate and genuine in its interpretation of Beethoven’s quartets.

It was one of the best nights of quartet music I have had the pleasure to see in more than three decades. And, of course, the best way to reward an appreciative crowd is to play a slow, beautiful movement from another Beethoven work.

The great climax in the concert came with Beethoven’s 13th string quartet with the five “Grosse Fuge” movement added to the work. That movement was part of the original quartet, but was later published as a separate piece.

The movement was a delightful addition, showing off Miró’s mastery of the complicated tempo shifts and lovely lyricism. This Beethoven quartet is a true masterpiece, and Miró performed it with joy and bright intensity.

Miró also played Beethoven’s 11th and F major string quartets. What stood out with both quartets was Miró’s freshness and exuberance with a well-balanced sound, intonation and pretty phrasing.

The concert experience was sensational, but still the squeaky seats in St. Cecilia Theatre at Cotter High School pose a problem for intimate performances. The seats are uncomfortable and you are afraid to move an inch because you don’t want to ruin a musical moment.

It’s time to re-evaluate that venue.

But still, this has been a great Minnesota Beethoven Festival, and so far Yo-Yo Ma and the Miró Quartet have been its stars.

To read the entire review, please click here.

This recording of old and new string quartets will make you feel cheerful about American music, even though one of the pieces is by a European and the other uses Eastern gestures.  Both works evoke American landscapes, and both have an open sound that seems an indeliable part of American musical identity.

Kevin Puts’s 2007 Credo uses delicate harmonics, vibrato-free hymns, and exotic modes to beautiful effect.  I cringe when I read program notes about new pieces that promise “a tour of the places where I find solace and hope” and have movement titles like “The Violin Guru of Katonah”: please, not another New Age, World Music assemblage of cloying cliches.  This piece is pretty sugary, especially the finale, put Puts knows how to write a tune and how to produce wonderfully prismatic effects in the scherzo sections.  The opening movement combines both qualities in rapt solo lines and quietly racing traceries.  This haunting work sounds a bit like Hovhaness or Part but has its own serene personality.  It was written for the Miro Quartet, which plays it with breathtaking purity and poetry.

They use the same approach with Dvorak’s American Quartet.  I’ve never heard a performance so light, feathery, and full of open air.  Dvorak wanted this quartet to sound American, not European, and that is communicated here.  He wrote it in a three-day spurt of inspiration in Spillville, Iowa, and the Miro players make it sound spontaneous and joyful.  The opening movement sparkles and flows and is over before we know it; the slow movement, based on a Negro spiritual (a form that was not taken seriously until Dvorak’s New World Symphony) is full of aching lyricism and subtle phrasing.  He constructed II to sound like a Scarlet Tanager, and the Miro players do indeed sing it like a songbird.  The finale races to the finish line with pure joy, holding the last chord as if they don’t want the piece to end.

The Tokyo (Sony) and Cleveland (Telarc) quartets supply strong competition in this music, and I’ve always loved the spirited and warm-hearted Guarneri reading from 1972 (RCA).  None of these, however, have and attractive contemporary American piece on the same program.

This is the first installment of a new series called “The Miro Quartet Live”, taped before an audience at the University of Texas at Austin.  The engineers supply a warm acoustic with a sense of open space.

Quick — how many guitarists can fit on the stage of the Long Center’s Dell Hall?

Try 200. And it was a phenomenal and charming sight.

Last night, as part of the Guitar Foundation of America’s annual convention and competition now taking place in Austin, some 200 young guitarists from around the country took the stage for a short concert under the direction of Michael Quant. The sea of strings sounded lush and colorful, particularly during the premiere of ‘Powerman,’ a fun yet thoughtful piece commissioned for the event from Austin composer Graham Reynolds. Let’s hope the young guitarists continue to rock on.

The youth guitar orchestra was the warm-up act of sorts for the evenings featured performers: guitarist Adam Holzman with the Miro Quartet.

But before the music started, GFA president Brian Head announced the 12 semi-finalists of the International Competition. Click here to see the list. The semi-finalists are competing today. On Sunday, four finalists will compete in a public concert beginning at 6:30 p.m. The winners will be announced during a 9 p.m. ceremony.

But last night the stage belonged to Holzman and the Miro. All on the faculty of UT, the fivesome clearly relished in the collaboration of playing together. That particularly came through in Boccherini’s exuberant Quintetto No. 4 a piece that bounced between virtuosic flourishes (particulary from the cello) and spirited leitmotifs full of Spanish flare.

Another treat was seeing Miro first violinist Daniel Ching play the delightful Giuliani’s Sonata Op. 85 in duet with Holzman.

To read full article, click here.

The American “Miró Quartet” showed at the Alte Oper that its name is by no means the program.

Why does a string quartet name itself after the painter Joan Miró, the most important Spanish surrealist? The interprative style of the four Americans is anything but dreamlike, visionary, bizarre or abstract. Rather the quartet, founded in 1995, tends towards a faithfulness to the text that sometimes approaches qualities of delicate understatement.

The sound is very transparent, thanks to the tone quality of the violist John Largess; the violins (Daniel Ching and Sandy Yamamoto) occasionally risk unusually strong Vibrato, while the cellist Joshua Gindele seems the center of the ensemble. With the Quartet op. 96 from Dvorak, the four musicians, who teach in Austin, Texas, offered up a dazzling calling card: not overdone in rhythm or tempo, animated small talk among the parts, elegant, yet virtuosic. The evening, which opened with Beethoven’s F-major Quartet op. 135, offered another facet of American music in the Quartet op. 11 from Samuel Barber; one heard
the famous Adagio in its rather episodic frame: clarity of sound and effortless cantilenas abducted the enthusiastic audience into other worlds.

The Miró Quartet showed off its ability to balance strong individual voices with an equally compelling ensemble profile on 23 February.  The quartet op. 18 no. 4 was composed by a musician frustrated by his encroaching deafness, and some of this torture is evident in its darkly coloured opening theme that rises from the lowest note of the violin to high in the instrument’s range (finely executed by Daniel Ching).

I missed the night’s final piece, but the op. 135 Quartet was a good place to leave things.  The Miró forged a connection between the first movement’s enigmatic pauses and the cosmic riddle written into the score of the finale (‘Must it be?’).  Each intrusion of that question was rendered with Hamlet-like angst, in contrast to a relatively tame account of the manic scherzo.  The answer came skittering as a propulsive affirmation.

Taken from the May 2010 edition of The Strad Magazine.  For more information on The Strad, please visit www.thestrad.com

Beethoven ended his string quartet production surprisingly simply. In
the group of five late string quartets, the F-major work does not have
the greatest weight and, in comparison to the Große Fuge, which was
separately published as op. 133 after Beethoven’s death, it strikes a
relatively mild note. Appropriately, the American Miro Quartet played
this last work comfortably unpretentiously. Even in the Finale with
the heading “The Difficultly Made Decision”, Daniel Ching, Sandy
Yamamoto (Violin), John Largess (Viola) and Joshua Gindele (Cello) did
not tell a story of passion as part of the chamber music series of the
Frankfurt Museum Society in the Mozart-Saal of the Alte Oper – with
the exception of the Grave section.

The interplay of the composer’s question-and-answer motifs (Must it
be? It must be!) had in fact something humorous in its approach:
Beethoven arranged them first, according to one anecdote, into a
little playful canon. Nevertheless, the Miro Quartet brought out the
wild dynamic changes and accents in the previous movements and
remained closely faithful to the indications in the score.

The ensemble, founded in 1995, interpreted the middle movement of the
string quartet op. 11 from Samuel Barber, in another form and arranged
for string orchestra famous as the Adagio, just as true to the text:
with a covered, but of course, in the emphatic ascent of the unending
melody, expressive sound and a timeless expression. The effect of the
middle movement is especially interesting in the context of the
framing “Molto Allegro” movements, which were not particularly
advanced for 1936 when the work was composed, but culminate quite
dissonantly for the Neo-Romantic Barber.

Dvoraks (American) String Quartet in F-Major op. 96 was similarly
convincing in its balance of sentiment and clarity. At the most, the
vibrato playing of the first violin in the upper register during the
first movement sounded a bit too sweet. But directly in the more
discrete passages, he and his companions followed their hearts. The
contoured, precise playing of the violist was especially enjoyable.
The Finale received a strong ending: elastically spirited and with
rythmic drive.

Saturday’s recital by the Miro Quartet at Dumbarton Church started off with a jolt of electricity. Beethoven’s early C-Minor String Quartet, Op. 18, No. 4, certainly provides opportunities for drama. But the Miro players paid particular attention to the work’s dark undercurrents, digging into its jabbing accents with a thrilling fervor and taking a full-blooded, freely rhapsodic approach to the score’s more restrained passages.

Those same qualities resurfaced after intermission, in white-hot traversals of movements from Mendelssohn and Schubert string quartets. Those two movements were actually part of an “a la carte menu” ballot that audience members were asked to vote on to create the second half of the program. Needless to say, traditional composers trumped the likes of Charles Ives and a newly commissioned work by Kevin Puts in the voters’ eyes. But the schmaltzy arrangement of Kern’s “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” was a guilty pleasure for “dessert.”

The world premiere of Quartet No. 4, by 21-year-old Indiana University biochemistry student Tudor Dominik Maican — a composing prodigy from the age of 5, with six symphonies and a raft of commissions under his belt — was passionately performed by the Miro. Its patchwork of received ideas (think Tchaikovsky in sentimental mode, crossed with the overheated chromaticism of Schoenberg’s “Verklarte Nacht”) was hardly fresh-sounding. But the writing was unfailingly attractive, with well-turned melodic material and an engaging, all-pizzicato middle movement that would serve any quartet well as an encore piece.

To read this review on the Washington Post website, click here.