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Concert Series:
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The concert scheduled for Febuary 8 has been POSTPONED due to severe weather predictions. Watch the website for information on the rescheduled date.
The Geostrophic String Quartet returns by popular demand! Featured will be some upbeat Richter, the ever-popular Hoffmeister by Mozart, and Schumann’s pleasing first quartet.Tickets are $20, $10 for students (including graduate students), and are available at the Bank of Woods Hole, Eight Cousins Bookstore (closed for renovations January 25 through February 5) in Falmouth, the Woods Hole Library, and at the door the day of the show. The Woods Hole Library doors will open at 1:30 for this 2 PM performance. For more information call the Library at 508-548-8961.
Violinist Matthew Liebendorfer, an Oberlin College graduate, is an active and prominent violinist in the New England chamber music scene. Violist Evie McFadden, trained as a violinist and music educator at West Chester State University, is a lifelong devotee of chamber music. David Hobbie, violinist and also an Oberlin College alumnus, grew up in Falmouth and graduated from Falmouth Academy. For the past 30 years, he has been a familiar performer in numerous local musical productions, including the Woods Hole Public Library’s Chamber Music Series. Bill Simmons, cellist and ardent supporter of Woods Hole Public Library, was a longtime Falmouth resident. Now retired from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Physical Oceanography department, he founded the Woods Hole Library’s Chamber Music Series in 1979, and produced, directed, and performed in that series through the mid 1990s. In 2011, he founded the Geostrophic String Quartet to help Woods Hole Historical Museum celebrate the life and work of Fritz Fuglister, violinist and WHOI oceanographer.
The concert will open with Franz Richter’s Opus 5/1 in C Major. Richter was born in Germany, died in Austria, and is claimed by the Czechs. He is a post Baroque, pre-classical contemporary of Haydn. According to Bill Simmons, “Richter was the first to break away from the Bel canto style of quartet writing, to spread the ‘fun’ around the group, and make his quartets real conversations.” Simmons continues, “He wasn’t the compositional genius Haydn was, so he isn’t generally credited with writing this quartet, but this piece is amazingly upbeat and inspirational, in only 3 movements, officially a Divertimento. It tends to be the piece that sticks in our heads after we rehearse. It is thought to have been composed in 1757, before Haydn wrote his ground breaking Opus 20 quartets.”
Mozart’s final 10 quartets are modestly known as the “Ten Famous” ones. The first 6 of them are dedicated to Haydn. The Geostrophic Quartet will play the seventh quartet, K 499, in D major, 1789, the so-called “Hoffmeister.” Simmons describes it as “looser than the Haydn’s quartets, more concerned with sensuous sound, glowing textures, hidden chromaticism, and wry humor. It’s sublime.”
The group will close with the first of Schumann’s 3 quartets, Opus 41/1 in A minor, “a brilliantly expressive and free-form work that drips with passionate emotion.” Simmons adds, “It was 1842. He had just married Clara, whom he had known for almost 15 years, both having been piano students of her father. But her father opposed their courtship (who wants a hopeless composer for a son in law?) It took 5-years and court battles but they were finally able to marry. They had just started a family, things were going very well for them, and this quartet projects their total contentment and happiness.”
With Bill Simmons’ lively and informative introductions to each piece, this fundraiser concert at the Woods Hole Public Library is sure to take the chill off of a February afternoon.
