Quartet to play something old, new

For a concert today at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, the Parker Quartet will play works fairly old, fairly new and very new.

The quartet -- violinists Daniel Chong and Ying Xue, violist Jessica Bodner and cellist Kee-Hyun Kim -- will perform a string quartet by Felix Mendelssohn, a string quartet by Dmitri Shostakovich and the premiere of a suite from a longer work the quartet commissioned from fellow Bostonian Jeremy Gill.

The concert, 7:30 p.m. in the Stella Boyle Smith Concert Hall, Fine Arts Building, UALR, 2801 S. University Ave., Little Rock, is part of the university's Artspree series, a joint presentation with the Chamber Music Society of Little Rock.

The performance of the String Quartet No. 1 in E-flat major, op.12, by Felix Mendelssohn, comes in the wake of the quartet's successful 2016 recording of two other Mendelssohn quartets, No. 3 and No. 5, for Nimbus Alliance.

"Not that we have anything against the ones we've recorded," Chong says of the choice of the first quartet for this program. "It's mainly because we like to keep things fresh, and our recording project on the Mendelssohn quartets has given us more keen insights into the language of Mendelssohn's music. So I think the benefit will apply to the quartet we're bringing to Little Rock.

"Mendelssohn is one of those composers who appeals to 98 percent of the population. His music straddles the line between Classical and Romantic aesthetics. He forms his music under Classical [era] principles, but the emotion and the drama is more inclined to Romantic approaches."

Chong says they have no immediate plans for a complete Mendelssohn cycle, which would involve recording his first, second and fourth quartets, but it's a possibility down the road. And considering how many times they've teamed up with other quartets to perform Mendelssohn's Octet -- "One of the most fun things to do," Bodner says -- a recording of that might be on the list as well.

Gill composed his nearly hour-long Cappricio specifically for the Harvard University-based players through a Chamber Music America commissioning grant. The quartet released its world-premiere recording in 2015.

"Jeremy actually lived in Boston; we were close -- he was the producer for the Mendelssohn recording," Kim explains. "Jeremy composed the piece, not only as a work of musical composition, but for use for educational outreach. And the nature of the piece illuminates all the techniques available to string instruments in a string quartet."

Bodner adds, "We feel like he knows us pretty well, and when he wrote this piece, he sort of sneakily wrote a little bit of our personality into it."

This will be the first time the quartet will play this particular set of extracts from the overall work.

"We've actually experimented with the suite quite a bit," Bodner explains. "The piece is so great; it's so multifunctional. You can use it in so many different kinds of ways.

"Each of the movements, even the simplest, holds a lot of musical substance, so you can really take any kind of combination and have a lot of interesting music. But given that there's so much music to choose from, we've been experimenting with what feels the best to play in a shorter suite.

"We talked with Jeremy quite a bit, tweaking ... movements; this will be the first time we'll be doing this exact combination."

Kim adds, "He has a very good ear and a very great sense of structure and how one thing flows into the next. So with his blessing -- he actually organized some more of these movements into a cohesive, smaller work, which we will present in Little Rock."

Weekend on 02/23/2017