Cypress String Quartet

PRESS ARCHIVE

Cypress Calls on Composer Elena Ruehr

Strings
January 2010

The Cypress String Quartet has announced a literary twist for its 11th annual Call and Response program, which calls on contemporary composers to respond to a masterwork. The concert on February 26 will feature Boston composer Elena Ruehr's work based on Ann Patchett's novel Bel Canto. Also on the program will be Mozart's String Quartet in D major, K. 575, and Schubert's String Quartet No. 14 in D minor ("Death and the Maiden"). Around the time of the performance, the Cypresses will release an album of Ruehr's string quartets Nos. 1, 3, and 4, which they commissioned in 2005. cypressquartet.com

Elena Ruehr

Sequenza 21
Posted by Phil Muse

String Quartets of Elena Ruehr
Performed by the Cypress String Quartet
Cypress Performing Arts Association "HOW SHE DANCED"

I was enchanted with this, my first acquaintance with the music of American composer Elena Ruehr, and I think you will be, too. A strong, engaging personality suffuses her music. She was born and spent her early years in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, an area of much natural beauty that is said to have the most beautiful fall colors in America. Her music reflects a variety of traditional and world influences in addition to her formal education under mentors William Bolcom, Milton Babbitt and Vincent Persichetti. The daughter of a mathematician, she admits to a fondness for solving intellectual puzzles such as 12-tone rows, but she decided at an early stage in her career to leave the complicated stuff beneath the surface of what people hear, incorporating it into the musical form (For the record, Mozart did much the same thing).

2009: A Good Year for Music

insidecatholic.com
by Robert R. Reilly - 12/28/09

I don't want to bid the year farewell without recognizing another enterprising "American Classics" CD from Naxos. This one contains String Quartets Nos. 1, 5, and 6 by Benjamin Lees (b. 1924), rivetingly performed by the Cypress String Quartet (8.559628). I do not know much about this man's music, which is why I am so deeply grateful to Naxos for the introduction. Now I want to know more. These are extraordinary, deeply thoughtful, intellectually intriguing, intense chamber works that so fit their medium that they seem quintessential. I am not at all surprised that Chamber Music America chose Quartet No. 5 as one of the 101 Great Ensemble Works. If you have made it past the Britten and Shostakovich quartets, here are works that will fully engage you. Lees does not offer sensuous surface appeal, but the depth is there. The latter two quartets were written in the 21st century. Obviously, Lees is working full steam ahead at the top of his game.

Classical music: The year’s best discs

The Denver Post
By Kyle MacMillan - Denver Post Fine Arts Critic
12/13/2009

"Beethoven Late Quartets, Vol. 1," Cypress String Quartet (Cypress String Quartet). One of the joys of today's chamber-music scene is the regular emergence of exciting young string quartets, such as this fine San Franciscobased ensemble formed in 1996.

It has daringly ventured into some of the most challenging quartet repertoire with this self-produced effort, offering direct, incisive interpretations of these two culminating masterpieces by the essential composer in this form.

LEES, B.: String Quartets Nos. 1, 5 and 6 (Cypress String Quartet)

www.naxos.com
David Denton
David's Review Corner, August 2009

Born in 1924, Benjamin Lees is one of the father figures in today's North American music, his series of six quartets spread through his career, his Sixth completed four years ago at the age of eighty-one. The first dates from 1952, not long after completing a formal education interrupted by service in the Second World War. Its mood immediately states an individual voice that leans towards mid-European atonal music of the time, but in his case atonality was used to create a variant on melodic invention. Fashioned in three movements, of almost equal length, the central gently flowing Adagietto comes between movements of much animation and avoids any hint of the anger fresh from thoughts of the dreadful conflict. We move on forty-nine years to the Fifth which came in response to a request from the present performers, the Cypress String Quartet. They wanted a work to perform that would respond to the two surrounding composers, Shostakovich and Britten. I find the four movements that resulted as quintessential Lees, with little influence from either composer, though I like it that way. Maybe there is just a modicum of Russia in the final movement marked 'Explosive', but it is of passing significance. He writes intuitively for the instruments especially when they are in dialogue. Three years later the Cypress asked for another work resulting in the Sixth, again in four movements, the third—as in the previous work—being very short. The change comes in a finale marked, 'Unhurried', where for the first time we hear sadness in his music, and it appears to come from within. The playing is obviously in sympathy with a composer they must know very well, the American-based ensemble having a glittering array of famous instruments on which to produce beautiful sounds. The engineering in these world premiere recordings is excellent.

String Quartet Gives Students Live Lesson

California Chronicle
April 24, 2009
By SARA PLUMMER

It was the first time 11-year-old Vanessa Monterrosa had heard classical music live. She sat in the center of the front row -- the best seat in the 1,200-capacity auditorium at Edison Preparatory School -- mesmerized by the sound coming from the four string musicians playing right in front of her. "I think it was wonderful," the Remington Elementary School fifth- grader said after the performance. "I was very, very surprised."

Students from Addams, Chouteau, Eugene Field, Kendall-Whittier, McKinley, Remington and Robertson elementary schools, Holy Family Catholic School and KIPP Tulsa College Preparatory received a concert and music lesson Thursday from the Cypress Quartet, which is based in San Francisco. The group is the first to perform in the musicians-in-residence program, sponsored by Chamber Music Tulsa and the Barthelmes Conservatory.

Uniquely American

Tulsa World
April 21, 2009
JAMES D. WATTS JR., World Scene Writer

It may have been invented in Austria in the 1700s, but the string quartet is — to hear Tom Stone tell it — a uniquely American way of making music.

"People tend to think of the string quartet as strictly European," said Stone, a violinist with the Cypress String Quartet. "But composers like Haydn were developing the form right around the time that this country was formed, at a time when the concepts of democracy and freedom and the rights of the individual were being closely examined.

How Does One Successfully Program Contemporary Music?

All Things Strings
April 16, 2009
by Graham Pellettieri

These days, one of the biggest challenges facing the classical music industry is figuring out how to successfully program new music. It is no secret that concerts that only feature contemporary composers' works and none of the traditional favorites—like Mozart and Beethoven—have a hard time filling the seats. So how do performing ensembles draw an audience to hear new music?

To find the answer, one needs to look no further than the Cypress String Quartet. Having the pleasure of attending the group's 2009 Call and Response concert earlier this month in San Francisco, California, I witnessed the talented quartet draw a crowd of diverse youngsters to listen to the premiere of Lento Assai— a newly written piece by contemporary composer Kevin Puts (b. 1972). The secret to the quartet's successful programming of contemporary music lies in its ingenious Call and Response program.

Fun & enlightenment in San Francisco

Not For Fun Only (blog by Axel Feldheim)
http://nffo.blogspot.com/2009/04/cypress-string-quartet-call-response.html
Sunday, April 05, 2009

Cypress String Quartet: Call & Response

Mendelssohn Bicentennial Celebration
Friday, April 3, 2009 at 8pm
Herbst Theatre

Mendelssohn, String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 13
Kevin Puts, Lento Assai (2009)
Beethoven, String Quartet in F Major, Op. 135

Thanks to a generous friend who got double-booked this evening, I was able to attend the Herbst Theatre Call & Response concert by the Cypress String Quartet. I was at one of their outreach programs last weekend, so it was nice to see the culminating concert.

Pre-concert, John Clare, a large jovial man with a mohawk, interviewed composer Kevin Puts on stage about his new work & composing in general. Mr Puts told us how difficult it is to achieve a blended sound when writing for woodwinds, though Mozart was a master at this. He shared with us his surprise on hearing the Cypress String Quartet play his work for the 1st time, quite close to the premiere. He discovered that sometimes their interpretation diverged significantly from his intent, causing him to realize the need to add more markings to the score. Mr. Puts is a tall, fit & handsome man, & the audience was clearly appreciative of the chance to hear him speak informally.

The Cypress String Quartet’s Call & Response

The San Francisco Examiner
April 4, 2009
by Mark Rudio

The Cypress String Quartet's Call and Response program commissions new works from contemporary, young composers to create a musical dialogue between the past and present. Saturday night at Herbst Theater they presented the tenth anniversary edition in program featuring Kevin Puts Lento Assai, Mendelssohn's String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 13 and Beethoven's F Major Quartet, Op. 135. The dialogue between the three works was apparent as the concert progressed- this was a consistently rewarding program, well played by each member of the CSQ.

At the Impromptu: One of the Best of the Best

Solares Hill
March 22, 2009
By Harry Schroeder

The Impromptu Concerts, Key West's 37-year-old chamber music series, went back to basics after the saxophone group of a few Sundays ago by bringing in a string group again. This one, the Cypress String Quartet, played works by Mozart, Dvorak and the American Impressionist composer Charles Tomlinson Griffes. Even by the high standards of modem string playing, the group was exceptional.

Cypress String Quartet mixes music, words, visions to examine American spirit

Tribune-Star
February 05, 2009
Dale Long/Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology

The tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001, left an indelible imprint on America's soul and serves as the inspiration for the dazzling, high-spirited multimedia presentation, "Inspired by America," by critically acclaimed Cypress String Quartet on Feb. 13 at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology's Hatfield Hall Theater.

The show, part of Rose-Hulman's Performing Arts Series, is being sponsored by Arts Illiana, a regional partner of the Indiana Arts Commission. Tickets are $15 for adults, $12 for youths and non-Rose-Hulman students, and free for the college's students. Interested persons can call the Hatfield Hall Ticket Office at (812) 877-8544 or visit between 1-5 p.m. on weekdays.

MBC hosts the dynamic Cypress Quartet

www.newsleader.com
By Charles Culbertson
Contributor
January 29, 2009

You're a lover of classical music, and you're looking for an evening in which you can listen to some of the world's most compelling music played by some of the world's most accomplished performers. What to do?

Well, there's no need to haul your culture-loving self all the way to the nation's capital, or even just over the mountain to the perpetually high-brow festival in Charlottesville. All you have to do on Monday is ease into a chair in Mary Baldwin College's Francis Auditorium, relax and take in a performance by a widely heralded string quartet known for its skill and vitality.

The Cypress String Quartet will headline the Carl Broman Series at MBC with a program calculated to delight a variety of classical music tastes.

Beethoven String Quartets – No 14, Op 131; No 16, Op 135

Gramophone Awards 2009
A young quartet launch themselves into late Beethoven with keen assurance

Beethoven String Quartets - No 14, Op 131; No 16, Op 135
Cypress Quartet (Cecily Ward, Tom Stone vns Ethan Filner va Jennifer Kloetzel vc)

Cypress Performing Arts Association

Beethoven's late string quartets challenge even the most seasoned ensembles to delve deeply into the expressive and structural elements that make these works such towering achievements. Can musicians who have been together only a dozen or so years truly succeed in illuminating the riches?

In the case of the Cypress Quartet, the answer is an unqualified "yes". The San Francisco-based ensemble's first volume of Beethoven quartets reveals artistry of uncommon insight and cohesion. The Cypress players are seamless conversationalists who take Beethoven at his word but aren't afraid to place keenly dramatic and subtle stamps on the music.

Benjamin Lees: String Quartets. Cypress String Quartet

All Things Strings
2009

Commissioning a new work inspired by older works is an unusual way to champion living composers, but that's how the Cypress String Quartet's critically acclaimed Call & Response program works. The players—Cecily Ward and Tom Stone, violins; Ethan Finer, viola; and Jennifer Kloetzel, cello—select two standard repertoire quartets and "call" on composers to "respond" by writing a new one. Benjamin Lees' (b. 1924) Fifth Quartet "responded" to Britten and Shostakovich and their influence is clear, especially Shostakovich's, whose mood swings and contrasts also are characteristic of Lees' own style.

Hughes to replace Murray as director

The Patriot-News
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
BY DAVID N. DUNKLE
Of The Patriot-News

"End of an era" is an overused phrase, but once in a while it fits.

Lucy Miller Murray's departure from Market Square Concerts after 26 years is a good example. During her tenure as director, she built a national reputation for the Harrisburg-based chamber music series.

"It's time for me to step down, and step back," said Murray, who turns 70 this year.

She will remain as a consultant through the 2008-09 concerts, which will be staged at Market Square Presbyterian Church and Whitaker Center.

Taking Murray's place as director is Ellen Hughes, 61, the former classical music host on public radio station WITF 89.5.

Composer, quartet ‘respond’ to Bartók

San Jose Mercury News
04/19/2008
By Richard Scheinin

Composer Kurt Rohde has written his first string quartet. He calls it "Gravities," and it gives the impression of elemental Earth forces at work, sucking together his musical materials, tightly binding them in a dark place, then blasting them apart and back toward the light. It feels mysterious and a little dangerous: The music teems with energy and keeps threatening to explode in your face.

The Cypress String Quartet gave the new piece a powerful, concentrated performance Thursday at the Montalvo Arts Center. The small, appreciative audience was seated practically eyeball-to-eyeball with the musicians in the salon-like main hall of the complex's historic villa. This is the way chamber music should be heard; the heat and impact of the music were inescapable.

Call & Response & Awesome Kids

San Francisco Classical Voice
By Janos Gereben
March 18, 2008

I'm glad to have the collaborative testimony of Classical Voice colleague Jeff Dunn in his review of the Cypress Quartet's "Call & Response" concert at Yerba Buena Center on Saturday, because I still find it difficult to believe what happened there.

Arriving at the Forum, I was taken aback by the sight of a full auditorium, full mostly with children. Not "youth" — children, of the 5th- and 6th-grade variety, in addition to a few high school students. Mostly kids, little ones.

Even somebody not of W.C. Field's disposition couldn't help wondering: What will they do? What will they do during the performance of the last quartets by Haydn (No. 77) and Bartók (No. 6), and the premiere of Kurt Rohde's Gravities? Will they fidget, shuffle, cough, sneeze, whisper, slap, kick, text, or just make cellphone calls outright? If they get through the Haydn, what will they do during 35 minutes of the darkest, heaviest, most sorrowful of all Bartók, a Transfigured Night on steroids and without transfiguration?

Miracle on Third Street

San Francisco Classical Voice
March 15, 2008
By Jeff Dunn

I had to pinch myself.

Nearly 200 schoolchildren at a string quartet concert listening to Bartók, and they're quieter than an equal number of old fogies like myself? Am I dreaming? Or did the Cypress String Quartet do mass hypnosis at the 19 schools it visited in the last three weeks before coming here to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts?

But no child was sleeping, and the many I asked after the concert said they liked all three pieces on the program, two of which, the Bartók Sixth Quartet and a new work by Kurt Rohde, are hard nuts to crack. In fact, Rohde himself told me that his highly dissonant (and expressive) Gravities was "chock full of nuts."

So the Cypress has been working magic, and there's hope for the future of classical music, despite soothsayers of demographic gloom and doom who decry graying audiences. What the Cypress has been up to is its Call and Response Program, in which it commissions new works for quartet (the "response"), inspired by "searching for connections across musical, historical, and social boundaries" (the Quartet's "call"). The group then gives a series of outreach presentations and public performances.

Panorama

Washington Square Magazine
Spring 2008

On a mission: Cypress String Quartet members (top, l to r) Tom Stone and Cecily Ward, violinists; Ethan Filner, violist; and Jennifer Kloetzel, cellist, are excited about helping young people to expand their experience of music. Sisters Matilda and Libby Ortiz are part of the Music Literacy program the quartet presents at San José's Horace Mann Elementary School. "The themes and ideas we hit on," says Stone, "are really universal themes of life."

With rave reviews of their worldclass performances, some musicians might simply enjoy the limelight. Instead, the Cypress String Quartet takes the vibrato of their music into classrooms in the Bay Area and nationwide. San José State's quartet-in-residence since 2003, the ensemble is using their innovative music education programs to introduce local students to the likes of Mozart, Beethoven and Kurt Rohde.

String quartet speaks eloquent musical language

The Union
November 28, 2007
By Charles Atthill

Attending the performance of a string quartet is like witnessing a stimulating conversation between friends, sensitive to each other and to the give and take of the argument. One speaks; the others comment, interrupt, change the subject. Sometimes they all speak at once. The secret is for the players not to obscure the message, however much they are enjoying themselves.

The San Francisco-based Cypress String Quartet - on a return visit (Nov. 18) to the Twin Cities Concert Association with a program of Mozart, Bartok and Dvorak - had a lot to say and said it with eloquence. But this wasn't a rerun. Since its impressive 2005 performance, the quartet seems to have matured technically, musically and as an ensemble.

The Washington Post

October 15, 2007

When a concert is interesting, sometimes it's the performance that grabs your attention. But sometimes it's the music that is revealed by the performance.

The Cypress String Quartet, in residence at San Jose State University, opened the 30th season of concerts at Dumbarton Church in Georgetown on Saturday with two 20thcentury American pieces, Griffes's Two Sketches for String Quartet and Barber's String Quartet, that don't get performed all that often.

Young, Dynamic, Courageous and Masterful

Augsburger Allgemeine
by Karl Martin Grass – article from 7/23/07

A Kaisheim-Leitheim surprise: A string quartet, still almost unknown in Europe, got off to a brilliant start at the Leitheim Castle Concerts: The Cypress String Quartet from San Francisco. The von Tucher family and circle of friends made an outstanding choice with this ensemble. This still rather young string quartet, having already reaped good reviews in America, proved to be a top-class and powerful ensemble.

Cypress Quartet finding a second home at Montalvo

Mercury News
By Richard Scheinin
Article Launched: 04/27/2007 01:33:19 AM PDT

Wayne Horvitz thinks the best thing for a band - whether it's a rock band, a jazz band or a classical string quartet - is the chance to play over and over again in the same club, space or hall. To have an extended engagement, set up a residency and "call it home," he says.

"It's not just checking into one more hotel," he says. "They get to know the place. They know the acoustics. They know the people. They're comfortable and they look forward to it. And so does the audience - it's like going to see a baseball team. After a while, you get to know the personalities, the chemistry, the interaction." All this explains why Horvitz - the Seattle-based keyboardist and composer whose own music roams jazz, pop and classical - is helping to bring the Cypress String Quartet to the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga for eight performances next season.

A Triumphant Performance by Cypress String Quartet

Independent Coast Observer
April 20, 2007
Iris Lorenz-Fife
Special to the ICO

The Cypress String Quartet paid its fourth visit to the Gualalu Arts for last Sunday's chamber concert. It has been a great pleasure to watch their increasing maturity through these years and I trust they will continue to perform regularly on the Coast.

Since 2001 the Cypress String Quartet has brought us a rich variety of music, showing themselves to be masters of the classical forms of Mozart, the the impressionism of Ravel, and the modernity of Benjamin Lees.