Call & Response 2012

Happy Spring!

In this first week of March 2012, we were thrilled to celebrate the official release of our 3-disc set Beethoven: The Late String Quartets with an intimate salon concert at Chronicle Books in San Francisco this afternoon - a performance that offered our friends a taste of Beethoven's Opus 127 (included on "Volume 3" of the cycle; and on Disc 1 of the box set) not only as one of the works on the new disc but also as one of the masterpieces making up the "Call" of this year's Call & Response program we'll be performing March 16th at 8pm at Herbst Theatre.

This year's program features quartets by Haydn and Beethoven, and the World Premiere of Philippe Hersant's Quatuor a Cordes No.3 completed in 2011, delivered to us in early January 2012 and loved instantly by the Cypress players as we sat down to learn it over the past several weeks. Hersant is the first international composer we have worked with through our Call & Response commissioning program. Philippe will be in town for the week of C&R to work with us on his new quartet - his first in nearly 25 years! - and he will be on hand for a pre-concert talk at 7:15 on the 16th at Herbst.

We have been busy visiting schools throughout the Bay Area in the build-up to C&R, bringing excerpts of the Hersant along with bits of the Haydn and sections of the Beethoven into more than a dozen classrooms and community centers in presentations for elementary through high school-aged kids. The deal is, we visit them in their 'home' - their school - introducing them to a variety of creative concepts brought to life by and through the music, and then invite them to come to our 'home' - the concert hall - for the full public performance of the pieces with which they have now become more familiar than much of the rest of the audience that will be in attendance on March 16th. In each of the last 12 years we have presented Call & Response in the Bay Area, the resulting audience - the mix of lifelong chamber music fan and young newbie and everything inbetween - is a revelation both to us in the quartet and to the 'regular people' in the audience who'd never have thought so many young kids could be so excited by the work of a classical string quartet. We expect no less a remarkable turnout in less than two weeks when we walk onstage to play a little Haydn, some Late Beethoven and some brand new French music for all of you at our 13th annual Call & Response.

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