Great Performances

The word Avery Fisher Career Grant just popped up on my phone and I was I was so shocked and I immediately called them back and I just heard all these words come out on the phone and I just couldn't believe it.

When I got myself together, I realized that my friends were next to me just looking at me like, What's going on?

On the floor.

Whats going on?

Because I was I was just like sitting on the floor with my violin in the back and I just said, I'm so sorry.

Excuse me, let me tell my group.

And I just put the phone away and I just said, Avery Fisher!

And then we all went, Oh my goodness!

We chose the name Balourdet Quartet in honor of the Taos School of Music, where three of us, Angela, Justin and I actually met in the summer of 2018.

Justin and Ben had actually played in a different chamber group prior to that, and we sort of decided to keep playing together at the Shepherd School of Music, where we knew we were all headed in the fall, but we were so inspired by being in the mountains and the spirit of chamber music making that all of the students and all of the faculty really helped to curate and inspire.

We really wanted to name i after something at the festival.

And so it's a little bit of a funny story because I was actually, at the end of the semester looking through my locker when we were looking for a name for the quartet, and out of my shoe fell the business card of Antoine Balurdet, who was really a lover of life and a lover of music, and he was the chef of the Hotel St. Bernard, where the Taos School of Music used to be held.

And one of the main things about that festival is that they have this amazing French food and we sort of all really became a community through the shared love of food and music.

We were always reading chamber music late into the night and as a group, really, one of the things that really brings us together is our love of food.

When we're on the road, it's a chance for us to actually catch up on how we're living life and what's going on with us outside of just rehearsing, we get to share meals together and it really brings us together as a group.

Chamber music is kind of the most condensed form of nonverbal communication that I can think of, and that happen in a lot of different contexts.

A lot of people spend their whole lives kind of playing with lots of different people, and that's really fun and getting to know a variety of musical personalities and just personalities in life.

But what a quartet offers is this kind of place where at this point we're basically siblings with each other.

But even beyond that, we've spent, you know, seven days a week, all of the day together, doing rehearsals, doing business oriented stuff, just enjoying our time socially and on the road and meeting people and seeing the world.

And all of these experiences have created kind of this fifth member in a way that's greater than the essence of what all four of us are.

And in particular, that's what makes string quartets so powerful.

We look up to those groups from the past, like the Cleveland Quartet, the ordinary quartet, the Juilliard Quartet, all of these groups who did that for so many years and continue to do that.

And then it's so inspiring to see so many groups our age continue that legacy with such a fervor because it is such a great art form.

The work we are performing is by Beethoven.

His seventh quartet in F Major Opus 59, No.1.

Last movement.

It's one of the standard repertoire, I think the last movement has such a celebratory aspect to it, and we couldn't think of a better movement and a better excerpt to bring into such a meaningful event.

And the movement itself at first doesn't seem so challenging, but as we played it more and more, the challenges are how to make it effective, how to make it fun, how to actually make it celebratory.

The piece uses this kind of folk song that Beethoven flips on its head.

It was a sad kind of dirge, and he kind of makes it into this joyous thing that almost calls in the springtime after what, we won't be playing the third movement, which is kind of this weeping and almost tragic movement.

Beethoven had been waiting for a long time to write more string quartets after his initial six, but he got this opportunity in a commission from a Count Razumovsky, who was a big music lover, amateur violinist, kind of a curmudgeonly figure.

But he saw Beethoven's greatness.

But even he could not have anticipated the three quartets that Beethoven wrote.

And of the three, Opus 59, No.

1 that we're playing is maybe the most radical piece in terms of launching the string quartet forward that had never been seen in history to that point.

So a little bit of a gift that Beethoven received in patronage he gave back to the world many times over.

When we got the news that we were going to be receiving the grant, one of the things that immediately came to mind was commissioning a composer.

We had been kind of working with a few people, kind of asking around and seeing what we could do, and we had been putting together a little bit of funds and seeing like, Oh, is this possible?

Is it the right time?

And something like this really allows for us to like, take advantage and do it now and really make something special that we have a lot of kind of control over who we can pick and why we want to do it.

Along with that, we also have a lot of like, I don't know, business oriented things.

We only get like headshots and stuff like that and we do some kind of group oriented things, but a lot of it's just putting it back into the quartet as fast as we can and getting those projects out there that we really want to do and have been wanting to do for a long time.

[Applause] We never imagined like all of the things that we could do when we first started out because we were so sort o engrossed in just enjoying music and enjoying each other.

And basically it felt like all of our mentors almost enabled us to just kind of like continue just having fun and exploring life and music together.