Archive for May, 2016

Walter & Elise Haas Fund: Hear the Cypress String Quartet Play Farewell

Source: www.haassr.org
May, 2016
By Frances Phillips, Program Director, Arts and The Creative Work Fund

The Walter & Elise Haas Fund joins with grantees and collaborators to ensure access and create opportunity for everyone. Normally, that involves bringing organizations, programs, and services to life. In the case of the Cypress String Quartet, however, our push for greater access to quality arts experiences for all is tied to helping a celebrated ensemble bring its work to a close.

Violinists Cecily Ward and Tom Stone, violist Ethan Filner, and cellist Jennifer Kloetzel celebrate their 20th and final season as the Cypress String Quartet with a series of free concerts. Over the next two weeks, they are performing all of Beethoven’s 16 string quartets in locations distributed across the city of San Francisco. Each concert makes live, free, high-quality chamber music accessible to many who would otherwise likely lack access. read more »

WDAV Radio Blog: The Cypress String Quartet’s Commitment

Source: blogs.wdav.org
May 7, 2016

Commitment is important if any kind of relationship is to have lasting value. When a group of people band together and commit themselves to a common goal the results can be simply remarkable. We see this in music quite often, whether it is within an orchestra or a chamber ensemble.

The successful string quartet, for example, consists of four musicians who have formed an alliance in order to achieve a common goal that all four individuals have realized make up the center of their collective being. Yes, it is a very emotional commitment, indeed. For it is the emotional commitment to excellence that results in such ensembles as San Francisco’s Cypress String Quartet. For the past twenty years violinists Cecily Ward and Tom Stone, violist Ethan Filner and cellist Jennifer Kloetzel have set new standards for community outreach with their neighborhood concerts as well as the commissioning of new works from leading contemporary composers in their numerous “Call and Response” projects. And with a repertoire of 18th and 19th century music from composers such as Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and Dvorak to 20th and 21st century composers as Schulhoff, Griffes, Lees, Higdon, Puts and others, the Cypress String Quartet has built a reputation on both sides of the Atlantic as one of this generation’s finest American ensembles. read more »

Beethoven: The Late String Quartets AV2356

Disc 1
String Quartet in E-Flat Major, Opus 127
String Quartet in A Minor, Opus 132

Disc 2
String Quartet in B-Flat Major, Opus 130
Große Fuge, Opus 133
and Alternate Finale

Disc 3
String Quartet in C-Sharp Minor, Opus 131
String Quartet in F Major, Opus 135

When people discuss the greatest contributions to the arts in Western civilization, names such as Shakespeare, da Vinci, and Beethoven inevitably arise. Proponents for Beethoven cite his five late quartets, which were the final works that he completed. In this three-disc set, reissued here on Avie Records, May 6 2016, the Cypress String Quartet brings a fresh voice of humanity and clarity to these monumental works.

The final disc completed for this set includes Beethoven's String Quartet in E-flat Major, Opus. 127 and his String Quartet in A Minor, Opus 132. These performances were recorded at Skywalker Sound by engineer Mark Willsher and produced by Cypress first violinist, Cecily Ward.

Read Fanfare Magazine's review of this box set

Included in the box set are program notes written by Joseph Kerman, the author of The Beethoven Quartets (W. W. Norton & Company).

In addition to the physical CD, high-resolution, audiophile-quality versions of this album are available for purchase in both 44khz/16-bit and 96khz/24-bit uncompressed .WAV audio formats via artistconnex, powered by Downloads NOW!

Purchase this album direct from the artists at cypressquartet.bandcamp.com

SAMPLES / TRACK LISTING

    Disc 1 [Opus 127 and Opus 132]


  • Beethoven 127-1 1. String Quartet in E-Flat Major, Opus 127: Maestoso - Allegro 6:05
  • Beethoven 127-2 2. String Quartet in E-Flat Major, Opus 127: Adagio, ma non troppo e molto cantabile 14:44
  • Beethoven 127-3 3. String Quartet in E-Flat Major, Opus 127: Scherzando vivace 8:54
  • Beethoven 127-4 4. String Quartet in E-Flat Major, Opus 127: Allegro 6:47
  • Beethoven 132-1 5. String Quartet in A Minor, Opus 132: Assai sostenuto - Allegro 9:49
  • Beethoven 132-2 6. String Quartet in A Minor, Opus 132: Allegro ma non tanto 8:32
  • Beethoven 132-3 7. String Quartet in A Minor, Opus 132: Molto Adagio - Andante 16:12
  • Beethoven 132-4 8. String Quartet in A Minor, Opus 132: Alla marcia, assai vivace 2:14
  • Beethoven 132-5 9. String Quartet in A Minor, Opus 132: Allegro appassionato - Presto 6:31

    • Disc 2 [Opus 130 and Opus 133]


  • Beethoven 130-1 1. String Quartet in B-Flat Major, Opus 130: Adagio ma non troppo - Allegro 14:18
  • Beethoven 130-2 2. String Quartet in B-Flat Major, Opus 130: Presto 2:07
  • Beethoven 130-3 3. String Quartet in B-Flat Major, Opus 130: Poco scherzoso: Andante con moto ma non troppo 7:25
  • Beethoven 130-4 4. String Quartet in B-Flat Major, Opus 130: Alla Danza tedesca: Allegro assai 3:57
  • Beethoven 130-5 5. String Quartet in B-Flat Major, Opus 130: Cavatina: Adagio molto espressivo 6:34
  • Beethoven 133 6. String Quartet in B-Flat Major, Opus 130: Original finale (1825): Grosse Fuge: Overtura - Fuga (Opus 133)15:15
  • Beethoven 130-6 7. String Quartet in B-Flat Major, Opus 130: Alternate finale (1826): Finale: Allegro 10:48

    • Disc 3 [Opus 131 and Opus 135]

  • Beethoven 131-1 1. String Quartet in C-Sharp Minor, Opus 131: Adagio ma non troppo e molto espressivo 5:44
  • Beethoven 131-2 2. String Quartet in C-Sharp Minor, Opus 131: Allegro molto vivace 3:06
  • Beethoven 131-3 3. String Quartet in C-Sharp Minor, Opus 131: Allegro moderato 0:43
  • Beethoven 131-4 4. String Quartet in C-Sharp Minor, Opus 131: Andante ma non troppo e molto cantabile-Piu mosso-Andante moderato e lusinghiero-Adagio-Allegretto-Adagio ma non troppo e semplice-Allegretto 14:27
  • Beethoven 131-5 5. String Quartet in C-Sharp Minor, Opus 131: Presto 5:19
  • Beethoven 131-6 6. String Quartet in C-Sharp Minor, Opus 131: Adagio quasi un poco andante 2:13
  • Beethoven 131-7 7. String Quartet in C-Sharp Minor, Opus 131: Allegro 6:58
  • Beethoven 135-1 8. String Quartet in F Major, Opus 135: Allegretto 6:41
  • Beethoven 135-2 9. String Quartet in F Major, Opus 135: Vivace 3:20
  • Beethoven 135-3 10. String Quartet in F Major, Opus 135: Lento assai, cantante e tranquillo 7:17
  • Beethoven 135-4 11. String Quartet in F Major, Opus 135: Grave ma non troppo tratto - Allegro 6:56

Fanfare Magazine Review
Sep.4, 2012
First, bravo! Another modern-day ensemble acknowledges the importance of placing the B♭-Major Quartet’s Grosse Fuge ahead of the alternate finale. The resisters, like the recently reviewed Shanghai Quartet, are in an ever-growing minority, one that, in my opinion, deserves to be discredited.

Second, bravissimo! The Cypress String Quartet’s traversal of Beethoven’s late quartets is the best, bar none, I’ve yet to encounter. These are performances of a technical perfection and keenness of interpretive insight that one is apt to hear only in the mind’s inner ear. Tiny details seen in the score but almost never heard are revealed with crystalline clarity. For example, in the opening Adagio measures of the B♭-Major Quartet, how often does one actually hear the C-G double-stop in the viola part on the upbeat to the sixth full bar? Yet here it is, as clear as can be, to no small degree the result of the Cypress Quartet players’ scrupulous observance of every one of Beethoven’s crescendo swells to a p and a recording of unusual penetrability.

But there’s something that goes way beyond following the composer’s dynamic and phrasing instructions or taking the lengthy exposition repeat, and it has to do with a musical intuition and vision of the work that, frankly, strikes me like a bolt of lightning. Every one of the quartet’s six movements, including the Grosse Fuge (seven if you count the alternate finale), and not just the Alla Danza , is played as if it were a dance. As many times as I’ve heard this quartet, it never before occurred to me that it’s as much an “apotheosis of the dance” as is the composer’s Seventh Symphony. Each of the quartet’s movements is informed by a stylized dance form of one type or another. The first movement opens with a stately entrée grave in 3 and then proceeds to alternate with a lively, vigorous, bounding type of dance in 4, perhaps a galliard. The second movement (Presto) in cut time might easily have its roots in the tarantella. The third movement (Poco scherzoso) bears certain characteristics of a gavotte. The fourth movement (Alla Danza) is a sad little Viennese waltz. The fifth movement (Cavatina) is, of course, the quartet’s sarabande, and the alternate finale could well be a rigaudon or tambourin. That leaves the Grosse Fuge , which in this context now becomes all important and lays claim to its hierarchical position as the quartet’s rightful conclusion, for it embodies all of the dance impulses that precede it. When you listen to the Cypress Quartet play this work, you will hear Beethoven’s B♭-Major Quartet as the dance suite it probably is, and you will quite literally hear the music dancing.

This is a very special performance, but it’s not the only one. The A-Minor Quartet’s great “Heiliger Dankegesang” is of a transfixing concentration and intensity that will melt your heart and bore a hole through your soul. And again, the combination of the ensemble’s clarity of voicing and the transparency of the recording expose every tiny scrap of filigree in the contrasting andante sections of the movement. This is music-making that will hold you absolutely spellbound in its thrall.

If reverence and awe, then joyful embrace, are Beethoven’s vision of a personal God in the “Heiliger Dankegesang,” what vision does he impart in the cold, impersonal, remote, and alien cosmogony of the C♯-Minor Quartet’s opening fugue? Is it that of Schubert peering into the dark, fathomless abyss? No, it’s the vision, rather comforting in its own way, of a universe neither benevolent nor malevolent, but unmindful of us and unfolding as it should. The key to capturing the essence of this music is not to play it devoid of expression but to play it with an expression that expresses expressionlessness. This the Cypress Quartet achieves with a feeling of aloofness and detachment conceived most immaculately.

Exothermic vs. endothermic—all-embracing warmth vs. calculated cold in the two preceding quartets. Where does Beethoven go from here? To foppery and tomfoolery in the final F-Major Quartet, a work filled mostly with good-natured humor and a generosity of spirit. But there remains the quartet’s Lento assai, a movement that, with its concluding autistic suspensions repeated over and over again, foretells the Mahlerian leave-taking—“ewig … ewig … ewig”—at the end of Das Lied von der Erde.

Read the complete review here

From my very first encounter with the San Francisco-based Cypress String Quartet in 33:2, I knew this was not just another string-quartet ensemble, that this was a group of special talent that was marked for greatness. I noted then the awesome technical resources and communicative expressiveness of these players and singled them out as my then current favorites in this repertoire. Nothing has changed since I made those statements. If anything, the completion of this set of Beethoven’s late quartets with the Nos. 12 and 15 has only reinforced my feelings. I would now pick the Cypress String Quartet over the Cleveland, Emerson, Artemis, Endellion, and Takács quartets and the Tokyo Quartet’s recent remake. It will now be a shame, and a major disappointment, if the Cypress String Quartet does not complete its Beethoven cycle with the early and middle quartets. This is potential Want List material and urgently recommended.

Jerry Dubins

Back to Discography

Beethoven: The Early String Quartets AV2348

String Quartet Op.18 No.1
String Quartet Op.18 No.2
String Quartet Op.18 No.6

Disc 2
String Quartet Op.18 No.3
String Quartet Op.18 No.4
String Quartet Op.18 No.5

Included in this new 2-CD set - released internationally on May 6, 2016 on Avie Records - are original, extensive and insightful program notes written by Jan Swafford, author of "Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph." Jan Swafford's biographies of composers Charles Ives and Johannes Brahms have established him as a revered music historian, capable of bringing his subjects vibrantly to life. His magnificent new biography of Ludwig van Beethoven peels away layers of legend to get to the living, breathing human being who composed some of the world's most iconic music. Swafford mines sources never before used in English-language biographies to reanimate the revolutionary ferment of Enlightenment-era Bonn, where Beethoven grew up and imbibed the ideas that would shape all of his future work. Swafford then tracks his subject to Vienna, capital of European music, where Beethoven built his career in the face of critical incomprehension, crippling ill health, romantic rejection, and 'fate's hammer', his ever-encroaching deafness. At the time of his death he was so widely celebrated that over ten thousand people attended his funeral.This book is a biography of Beethoven the man and musician, not the myth, and throughout, Swafford - himself a composer - offers insightful readings of Beethoven's key works. More than a decade in the making, this will be the standard Beethoven biography for years to come.

More Information on CSQ-AVIE releases: Avie Records website
30 second samples coming soon
SAMPLES / TRACK LISTING
2:38:29 total running time

SF Chronicle: Cypress Quartet brings Beethoven to the Tenderloin

Source: www.sfchronicle.com
May 5, 2016
by Joshua Kosman
Media: Tim Hussin

The regulars at St. Anthony Dining Room in the Tenderloin have the drill down pat — the flow of the food line, the protocol for getting second helpings, the sight of familiar faces. What they didn’t anticipate on Wednesday, May 4, was having a string quartet regale them with Beethoven’s music while they ate a free lunch.

“Well, that was special, and unexpected,” said Cathy Carpenito, a 40ish San Francisco resident who had dropped into the facility with her friend Sly Ham, 59. “We were walking by and just saw the violins through the window.” read more »

SFCV.ORG: Cypress SQ Pops Up With Ludwig van B.

Source: www.sfcv.org
May 3, 2016
by Marc Macnamara

The Cypress String Quartet returns on May 4 for two weeks of free concerts. The program includes the complete string quartets of Beethoven, whose works are at the heart of their repertory.

It’s also a celebration of the quartet’s 20th anniversary; a thank-you gesture to San Francisco for having been such a reliable host all these years, and also what you might think of as a dramatization of the ‘gospel of unexpected beauty.’

The series lasts through May 19. Venues include St. Anthony’s Dining Room, the West Sunset Playground, Justin Herman Plaza, Japantown’s Peace Plaza, Mission Dolores Park, Jane Warner Plaza, Ft. Funston, Bernal Heights, General Hospital, the park at Hayes and Octavia, the City Hall Rotunda, Sutro Baths, the Botanical Gardens, and Yerba Buena Gardens. read more »

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Concert review: Cypress String Quartet leaves on a high note

Source: www.post-gazette.com
By Elizabeth Bloom
April 27, 2016

If you didn't see the Cypress String Quartet perform at Carnegie Music Hall this week, you probably missed your chance to hear them live.

The San Francisco-based quartet announced earlier this year that it will disband in June, so the ensemble’s concert on Monday represented both its debut and its swan song in the Chamber Music Pittsburgh series.

But the quartet’s legacy will live on in the form of a robust trail of recordings, including three of the four works featured on Monday's long program. read more »

SF Weekly: Cypress String Quartet at St. Anthony’s Dining Room (Beethoven in the City)

Source: www.sfweekly.com
By Jessie Schiewe
April 27, 2016

On November 9, 1822, Prince Nicholas Galitzine of Russia sent a letter to Beethoven asking for three string quartets at a price "you think proper." More than two months later, Beethoven wrote back, accepting the commission and quoting each opus at 50 ducats. Though this wasn't Beethoven's first string quartet, it was in this later period of his life — he died in 1827 — that he wrote the bulk of them, while occasionally ill and bedridden. read more »

SJ Mercury News: Classical Notes (Beethoven in the City)

Source: www.mercurynews.com By Georgia Rowe, corresepondent April 25, 2016

Throughout its 20-year career, the Cypress String Quartet has performed thousands of concerts, commissioned dozens of new works, recorded more than 15 albums and earned a loyal following in the Bay Area. The San Francisco-based foursome -- Cecily Ward and Tom Stone (violins), Ethan Filner (viola) and Jennifer Kloetzel (cello) -- has been heard in concert halls across North America, Europe, Asia and Latin America and on the popular Netflix series, "House of Cards."

All good things must end, however, and earlier this year, the Cypress announced that this season would be its last. The quartet plays its final salon concerts May 13-22 in Berkeley, San Francisco and Palo Alto; a farewell concert is scheduled for June 26 at the Green Room in San Francisco's Veteran's Building. read more »

KQED: Cy and David’s Picks: …20 years of Beethoven

Source: www.kqed.org/arts
By Cy Musiker
April 28, 2016

May 4 – June 26: The Cypress String Quartet set out 20 years ago to play and record all of Beethoven’s string quartets (with a few detours for some modern composers). Now that they’re done, they’re disbanding. It’s not, said cellist Jennifer Kloetzel, that they aren’t still finding fresh insights into Beethoven’s amazing cycle of quartets: read more »

SF/ARTS: Beethoven Pops Up All Over Town

Source: www.sfarts.org
May, 2016
by Larry R. Larson

Cypress String Quartet performs “Beethoven in the City,” 16 free concerts throughout San Francisco in a farewell “tour around town.”

“We’ve been forged in the fires of Beethoven,” declares Jennifer Kloetzel, Cypress String Quartet cellist. After a distinguished two-decade run, the Quartet—whose other members are violinists Cecily Ward and Tom Stone and violist Ethan Filner—is capping its legacy with a series of free concerts across San Francisco under the umbrella title “Beethoven in the City.” “Not a week has gone by in the past 20 years that we haven’t played, talked about, rehearsed or recorded this music,” Kloetzel says.

The series comprises 16 string quartets of Ludwig von Beethoven that span the composer’s life. They are arguably the most intimate and personal of his works, offering a spiritual journey of Western culture. Cypress will play each of the quartets in a “pop-up” concert in 16 different locations in the city. read more »