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It is the 70th anniversary of the Juilliard Quartet, and that's a very big deal.
I think the quartet has become known and respected for taking old works and making
them seem new, and taking new work in treating them with the respect of
an old revered masterpiece.
There is a continuity; it isn't that we had the past, and now we've got the
future. It is this continual thing that we do.
A marker of an anniversary as significant and as long as a 70th
anniversary tends to be an opportunity to put together a retrospective. In this case,
this anniversary offers the opportunity to look ahead, as well, and to imagine.
This is a very special year for us; we have a new cellist after,
I guess, 42 years ofJoel Krosnick's work with the quartet.
I grew up here in New York listening to this quartet, going to as many concerts
as I could, and it just, you know, the idea of being a part of it now it's...
quite wonderful and thrilling. I still have to pinch myself sometimes. Has this happened?
Astrid has enveloped herself in the quartert so quickly that I don't think
it's really part of our thinking; it's just the four of us.
We're playing Op. 95 Beethoven, the Op. 59 No. 1 Beethoven, and
the Op. 130 Beethoven with the original ending which was the Grosse Fuge. We're also
playing the first Bartok quartet, a Haydn quartet, and Mendelssohn Op. 13,
So that's extremely exciting just to be able to play that repertoire, but of course it's
particularly special because we have this new piece by Mario Davidovsky, who's
a legend in his own time. I mean, he's really one of the most revered and
sought-after composers of his generation.
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We were very fortunate in this case that Mario, living in New York City, was quite
available to work with us as much as we wanted him involved.
To me the big thing that we gain from working with Mario is
that we get a picture into the landscape of his mind and it is fascinating.
"You know, it's written mezzo-forte, you know, so somehow the aggregate of the
three instruments should sound like one string instrument like hope they're
almost when you play try to do to hear the other person or not to be above it, kind of."
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He talks about the surfaces of music and how when working
with electronic music, you could actually set up a sound which is noticeably well
in the background, and then have things at different surfaces closer and further from the audience.
He has the the quartet mimicking or referencing some of the
more electronic sounds. That was very interesting for us to know.
[LAUGH] OK, that's what you're after.
Now with the composer who's alive, we get to look inside their minds and try to
become clearer for ourselves what that composer was thinking and we get that
first hand information. But with a composer like Beethoven, we're doing the
same thing, and I think that helps to understand the importance of integrating
the past and the future. That it's not two different things; it really is kind of
one...one process that we go through.
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To the extent that we possibly can, amongst our touring, amongst teaching of our
instruments, we try to put a great deal into coaching chamber music.
The process of teaching and being able to distill and communicate what it is that we're...
the way that we think, just makes it that much clearer for ourselves.
The students themselves are incredibly skilled, incredibly devoted. It's a very
stimulating environment in which to be a teacher.
In a way that I hadn't quite realized before I joined the quartet, it's a
very deep relationship between Juilliard quartet and school. I mean, I knew it was
based here, but the more one gets involved in the quartet, the more aware one is of
the tremendous support really providing a home for the quartet and using the quartet
almost as a way of getting out into the world.
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