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The Chiara String Quartet — clubbing with the classics |
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Written by Kurt Brighton
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Thursday, 28 February 2008 |
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This is a strange world we’re living in, and it seems like it’s just getting stranger.
Sometimes it can make you feel like Billy Pilgrim, Kurt Vonnegut’s experiential time-traveler in “Slaughterhouse-Five,” aimlessly wandering a weird dreamscape, never knowing what bizarre sight might greet you next. It could be Hilary Clinton calling Obama a Washington insider. It could be Jimmy Kimmel singing a love — er, lust — song to Ben Affleck.
Or it could be Chiara String Quartet cellist Gregory Beaver belting out some very familiar words over the strains of two violins and a viola playing a familiar tune: “Dearly Beloved: We are gathered here today to celebrate this thing called life...”
This ain’t your grandaddy’s classical music. Chiara — an Italian word meaning clear, pure or light — is made up of Beaver, Rebecca Fischer and Julie Yoon on violin, along with violist Jonah Sirota. They have been playing together professionally for eight years or so, but it’s only recently that the four have sought to expand their sound into more readily accessible music.
“We decided to start playing clubs a year and a half ago,” Sirota said between classes at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where the quartet’s members are artists-in-residence for the semester before moving on to Harvard next fall. “The reason was that we’ve cared all along about getting the music to as broad an audience as possible. But one audience we never caught was people our own age. Concert halls were just not capturing our own peers. A hall maybe seems like a place where middle-aged and elderly people hang out. You open the program and you’re already bored. For people who know this music, that’s fine. But if it’s your first time...”
And that’s how the club version of the quartet was born. Playing a mix of more dynamic classical pieces along with newer pieces commissioned by the quartet from up-and-coming modern composers, the club shows have an amped-up feel that would be impossible to achieve in a concert hall setting. Given that so much modern music so readily straddles genres, it couldn’t have come along at a better time.
The experience is so different than that of a traditional concert hall show that Sirota said even sophisticated classical music lovers may not recognize a piece right away, simply due the context being so radically different. But it’s not just the music that changes in the club setting. According to Sirota, the music can have an effect that goes beyond idly tapping one’s toe or nodding in time to the music.
“We respect music, and we respect our audience as sophisticated, smart people who want to hear good music, and that’s why this works,” he said. “It’s an experience. Its not easy-listening by any means. It changes us and the listeners.”
TO GO
• The Chiara String Quartet
• 8 p.m. Friday, Feb. 29
• Avogadro’s Number , 605 S. Mason St. in
Fort Collins
• $12 advance, $15 day of the show
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