Tonight’s music was provided and performed by Telegraph Quartet, faculty-in-residence string quartet at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
Check out our newest album featuring an amazing Polish woman, Grazyna Bacewicz and please consider supporting our project if you like what you hear!
The Telegraph Quartet has always been interested in unearthing new and vibrant works by composers not as often played as they should be. As we have found in our search, there is a very deep vein of music by women composers that has not reached nearly enough ears compared to their male counterparts and deserves to be given its full due. We hope you enjoy our offerings below of some of the most vibrant works by women composers we have performed recently.
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Inspired by Frank's own walkabout to her ancestral homeland of Peru, this movement of her larger string quartet features the Chasqui messenger runner who would have delivered important news between the villages and cities across the ancient Incan towns of the Andes. As such, the music is, as she described it, "fleeting" and often full of a heightened urgency!
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Eleanor Alberga wrote this brief string quartet (only partially shown here) along with her first quartet after experiencing a particularly enthralling physics lecture! While she admits to not actually remembering the details of this lecture, the sensation stayed with her in the form of this angular, chaotic and molecular dance-like rhythms that permeate this vibrant work.
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Grazyna Bacewicz was a renowned Polish woman violinist and composer who had a long and prolific musical career over the mid 20th Century. This work was written in the post-WWII years following the harrowing occupation of Warsaw, through which Bacewicz and her family lived and fought to keep their Polish culture and identity alive. Both the flavor of Polish folk music and the renewed optimism of this period live in this third movement of her 4th String Quartet.
Click on the link to go directly to our YouTube playlist of the above material.