Programs

Program 1: Ops. 13; 20 (Octet) with the Hausmann Quartet
Program 2: Ops. 12; 44, No. 2
Program 3: Ops. 80; 87 (Viola Quintet) with Andrew Duckles, viola

About This Performance

Felix Mendelssohn would have turned 200 years old in 2009, and the Alexander String Quartet has put together a season of chamber music to celebrate the occasion. Mendelssohn was the most precocious composer this side of Mozart, a fact that stands revealed by the opening work, the miraculous Octet for Strings, composed when he was 16 years old. The season concludes with his heart-breaking String Quartet in F minor, Op. 80, dedicated to the memory of his beloved sister Fanny and composed just months before his own death.

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artist biography

Having celebrated its 25th Anniversary in 2006, The Alexander String Quartet has performed in the major music capitals of four continents, securing its standing among the world’s premier ensembles. Widely admired for its interpretations of Beethoven, Mozart, and Shostakovich, the quartet has also established itself as an important advocate of new music through over 25 commissions and numerous premiere performances. In 1999 BMG Classics released the Quartet’s nine-CD set of the Beethoven cycle on its Arte Nova label to tremendous critical acclaim. The FoghornClassics label released a three-CD set (Homage) of the Mozart quartets dedicated to Haydn in 2004. Foghorn released a six-CD album (Fragments) of the complete Shostakovich quartets in 2006 and 2007, and a recording of the complete quartets of Pulitzer prize-winning San Francisco composer, Wayne Peterson, was released in the spring of 2008. A re-examination of the Beethoven cycle will follow in 2009.

The Alexander String Quartet’s annual calendar of concerts includes engagements at major halls throughout North America and Europe. The Quartet has appeared at Lincoln Center, the 92nd Street Y, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York City; Jordan Hall in Boston; the Library of Congress and Dumbarton Oaks in Washington; and chamber music societies and universities across the North American continent. Recent overseas tours have brought them to the U.K., the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, France, Greece, the Republic of Georgia, and the Philippines. The many distinguished artists to collaborate with the Alexander String Quartet include pianists Menahem Pressler, Gary Graffman, Roger Woodward, Jeremy Menuhin, and James Tocco; clarinetists Eli Eban, Charles Neidich, Joan Enric Lluna, and Richard Stoltzman; cellist Sadao Harada; soprano Elly Ameling; and saxophonists Branford Marsalis and David Sánchez.

The Alexander String Quartet’s 25th anniversary was also the 20th anniversary of its association with New York City’s Baruch College as Ensemble in Residence. This landmark was celebrated through a performance by the ensemble of the Shostakovich string quartet cycle at Engelman Recital Hall in the Baruch Performing Art Center in April 2006. Of these performances, The New York Times wrote, “The intimacy of the music came through with enhanced power and poignancy in the Alexander quartet’s vibrant, probing, assured and aptly volatile performances. … Seldom have these anguished, playful, ironic and masterly works seemed so profoundly personal.” The Alexander was also awarded Presidential Medals in honor of their longstanding commitment to the Arts and Education and in celebration of their two decades of service to Baruch College.

Highlights of the 2007-2008 season include the completion of a Beethoven cycle at Baruch College in New York and a series of three all-Brahms programs at Mondavi Center at the University of California at Davis. San Francisco Performances presents the continuation of a Beethoven cycle as well as a five-concert series, “Inspirations,” featuring Carter, Crumb, Greenberg, Harrison, and Peterson and works that inspired them by Haydn, Schubert, Bartók, and Ravel. The Pittsburgh Chamber Music Society presents the quartet in both its opening and closing concerts this season, and the quartet continues annual residencies at Lewis & Clark College (Portland, Ore.), Allegheny University, and St. Lawrence University. Plans for 2008-2009 include a performance in collaboration with Branford Marsalis at the Lied Center at the University, featuring Eddie Sauter’s “Focus,” a 1960 composition written for Stan Getz. The quartet will also make its first tour of Argentina, perform a series of Brahms concerts at Baruch College, a series of Mendelssohn programs for San Francisco Performances as well as the completion of a Beethoven cycle, and begin a Beethoven cycle at Mondavi Center.

Among the Quartet’s recent premieres are “Rise Chanting” by Augusta Read Thomas, commissioned for the Alexander by the Krannert Center and premiered there and simulcast by WFMT radio in Chicago. The Quartet has also premiered String Quartets Nos. 2 and 3 by Pulitzer Prize-winner Wayne Peterson and works by Ross Bauer (commissioned by Stanford University), Richard Festinger, David Sheinfeld, Hi Kyung Kim, and a Koussevitzky commission by Robert Greenberg. Upcoming premieres include a new work being commissioned by San Francisco Performances from Jeeyoung Kim.

At home in San Francisco, the members of the Alexander String Quartet are a major artistic presence, serving as Ensemble in Residence of San Francisco Performances and as directors of the Morrison Chamber Music Center at the School of Music and Dance in the College of Creative Arts at San Francisco State University. The Alexander String Quartet was formed in New York City in 1981 and the following year became the first string quartet to win the Concert Artists Guild Competition. In 1985, the Quartet captured international attention as the first and only American Quartet to win the London International String Quartet Competition, receiving both the jury’s highest award and the Audience Prize. In May of 1995, Allegheny College awarded Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degrees to the members of the Quartet in recognition of their unique contribution to the arts. Honorary degrees were conferred on the ensemble by St. Lawrence University in May 2000.

Robert Greenberg was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1954, and has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1978. He received a BA in music, magna cum laude, from Princeton University in 1976 where his principal teachers were Edward Cone, Daniel Werts and Carlton Gamer in composition; Claudio Spies and Paul Lansky in analysis; and Jerry Kuderna in piano. In 1984, Greenberg received a Ph.D. in music composition (with distinction) from the University of California, Berkeley, where his principal teachers were Andrew Imbrie and Olly Wilson in composition and Richard Felciano in analysis.

Greenberg has composed over 45 works for a wide variety of instrumental and vocal ensembles. Recent performances of his works have taken place in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, England, Ireland, Greece, Italy and the Netherlands, where his Child's Play for String Quartet was performed at the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam.       

Greenberg has received numerous honors, including three Nicola de Lorenzo Composition Prizes and three Meet-The-Composer Grants. Recent commissions have been received from the Koussevitzky Foundation in the Library of Congress, the Alexander String Quartet, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Strata Ensemble, San Francisco Performances, and the XTET ensemble. He is a board member and an artistic director of COMPOSERS, INC., a composers' collective/production organization based in San Francisco. His music is published by Fallen Leaf Press and CPP/Belwin, and is recorded on the Innova label.

In addition to having performed, taught and lectured extensively across North America and Europe, Greenberg is currently Music Historian-in-Residence with San Francisco Performances, where he has lectured and performed since 1994, and is a faculty member of the Advanced Management Program at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. He has served on the faculties of the University of California at Berkeley, California State University East Bay and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he chaired the Department of Music History and Literature from 1989-2001 and served as the Director of the Adult Extension Division from 1991-1996.

Greenberg has lectured for some of the most prestigious musical and arts organizations in the United States, including the San Francisco Symphony (where for ten years he was host and lecturer for the Symphony's nationally acclaimed “Discovery Series”), the Chautauqua Institute (where he was the Everett Scholar-in-Residence during the 2006 season), the Ravinia Festival, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Van Cliburn Foundation, the Nasher Sculpture Center, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, the Hartford Symphony Orchestra, Villa Montalvo, Music @ Menlo, and the University of British Columbia (where he was the Dal Grauer Lecturer in September 2006). In addition, Greenberg is a sought-after lecturer for businesses and business schools, and has recently spoken for such diverse organizations as S.C. Johnson, Canadian Pacific, Deutsches Bank, the University of California/Haas School of Business Executive Seminar, the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, Harvard Business School Publishing, Kaiser-Permanente, the Strategos Institute, Quintiles Transnational, the Young Presidents’ Organization, the World Presidents’ Organization, and the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco.

He has been profiled in the Wall Street Journal, INC. Magazine, the Times of London, the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, the University of California Alumni Magazine, Princeton Alumni Weekly and Diablo Magazine. For many years Greenberg was the resident composer and music historian to National Public Radio’s “Weekend All Things Considered” and presently plays that role on NPR’s “Weekend edition, Sunday” with Liane Hansen.

In February 2003, the Bangor Daily News (Maine) referred to Greenberg as the “Elvis” of music history and appreciation, an appraisal that has given more pleasure than any other.

In May 1993, Greenberg recorded a 48-lecture course entitled “How to Listen to and Understand Great Music” for the Teaching Company/Great Courses Program of Chantilly, Virginia.  (This course was named in the January, 1996 edition of Inc. Magazine as one of “The Nine Leadership Classics You've Never Read”.) Formerly associated with the Smithsonian Institute, the Teaching Company is the preeminent producer of college level courses-on-media in the United States. Twelve further courses, including "Concert Masterworks," “Bach and the High Baroque,” “The Symphonies of Beethoven" and “How to Listen to and Understand Opera” have been recorded since, totaling over 500 lectures.