Daedalus Quartet to thrill VCU Saturday

The 2008-2009 season of the Mary Anne Rennolds Chamber Concerts Series kicks off this Saturday with one of the premiere American chamber ensembles, the Daedalus Quartet. As violist for the group, Jessica Thompson is preparing for an evening filled with drama, wit and musical dialogue. The group is performing three very moving and very well-regarded pieces: “String Quartet in G Minor, Opus 20, No. 3” by Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809), “String Quartet No. 2 ‘Intimate Letters’ ” by Leos Janácek (1854-1928) and “String Quartet in A Major, Opus 13” by Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847).

The Commonwealth Times: Are you excited about coming to VCU, and what other engagements do you have coming up?

Jessica Thompson: We’re absolutely excited about coming to VCU to perform. The concert we’re having there kicks off a weeklong tour of the South. After VCU, we’ll be going to Norfolk and Williamsburg, then to Mobile, Alabama and, finally, Atlanta.

The CT: You met members of the Daedalus Quartet at the Marlboro Music Festival in southern Vermont, correct?

JT: Min-Young Kim (violin), Raman Ramakrishnan (cello) and I were together at the Marlboro Festival in 2000. I had met Raman a couple years earlier at the Taos Solar Music Festival. 2000 was the year things sort of coalesced for us.

The CT: What was it like for you having these new connections and the possibility of making great music with them?

JT: Playing in a quartet is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. Our violinists, Min and Kyu-Young Kim, who are brother and sister, had tried to get quartets going before. It’s a really hard thing to do, and it’s great to find a group of young people who you really click with, musically and otherwise. Personality-wise, we all get along really well. We have similar senses of humor. Of course, we disagree on some things, but generally, I feel like we’re starting off on the same page, so it’s easier to work through whatever differences that we have, or how phrases should go, etc.

The CT: Haydn, Mendelssohn, Janácek-what is it like going into a concert with the weight of such heavy pieces on your shoulders?

JT: We try not to think about it that way (laughs). It’s amazing really. We just feel very lucky to be able to communicate or bring this music to an audience. Because they are amazing pieces and, as you said, with the weight of history, they need to be played to be heard.
I think that’s the reason all four of us wanted to play quartets, because there’s so much amazing repertoire out there for string quartet. I mean, some of the greatest composers wrote some of their best music for this combination of instruments.

The CT: The Hayden quartet is going to be on your upcoming CD set to be released in 2009, correct?

JT: We’ll be recording all six of the Opus 20 quartets in the early part of next year. We’re really excited about that project.

The CT: Being one of Haydn’s most highly regarded works, has it long been a goal of yours to record that particular opus?

JT: We learned a couple of the Opus 20 quartets earlier on – four or five years ago – and loved them. But you know, we’ve learned other Haydn quartets also. He had such an amazing output-it’s incredible. But we kept coming back to the Opus 20s and just decided to make a project of it and learn all of them. We’ve actually done concerts where we play all six in an evening.

The CT: That’s a pretty lengthy program, I would imagine.

JT: With intermission, it usually ends up being about three hours. It’s not the epic kind of evening it would be if we were to, say, play six Beethoven quartets. It’s still amazing though, how much variety there is within those six Haydn quartets. There’s incredible humor, wit and this great conversational aspect to them. But there’s also real drama and the piece includes a lot of stormy moments. In the one we’ll be playing this Saturday – Opus 23 in G Minor – you really get a sense of the drama and storminess Haydn was trying to convey.

The CT: A large percentage of our readers probably haven’t heard these works. What can you tell the readers that will really help draw them to your concert-aside from your reputation, of course?
JT: I hope that helps (laughs). The music is really incredible. The wonderful thing about chamber music is that it involves the audience in a way that maybe a larger symphonic concert wouldn’t. There’s a feeling of intimacy created between the four of us and the audience. We try to draw the audience into this conversation that we have with each other through the music.

The CT: You’ve accomplished a lot as a group already. Do you have any more projects you want to tackle?

JT: Oh gosh . I’ll probably be feeling that way for the rest of my life. We’ve done some of the Beethoven late quartets-not all of them. Those are the pinnacle of quartet repertoire and music in general, I think. We’d like to do more of that. There are amazing Schubert quartets, Bartok quartets – again, of which we’ve played some of – but there are just so many amazing pieces out there.

The CT: So, less so in the contemporary realm?

JT: Oh, actually no. That’s something we’re also interested in doing. We’ve played a couple Elliott Carter quartets and we have tentative plans to record some of them. We’re in the process of commissioning a quartet piece by Fred Lerdahl. He’s a professor of composition at Columbia and wrote two quartets back in the ’70s and hasn’t written for that instrumentation since then, so we’re really excited about this new piece that we’ll be getting sometime next year.

Jessica Thompson and the Daedalus Quartet will be performing Saturday, Sept. 13, at 8 p.m. at the Sonia Vlahcevic Concert Hall in the W.E. Singleton Center for the Performing Arts. Tickets are $32 for adults, $28 for seniors, $28 for VCU employees and $10 for students. There will also be a master class held 4 p.m. Friday, Sept. 12, in the same location that is free to the public.