March 17, 8:00 pm
March 18, 6:00 pm
First Pres Santa Monica

Leon Kirchner
  Five Pieces for Piano (1987)
Richard Rodney Bennett
  Six Tunes for the Instruction of Singing Birds (1981)
Christopher Rouse
  String Quartet No. 2 (1988)

William Schuman
  In Sweet Music: Serenade on a setting of Shakespeare (1978)
Christopher Rouse
  String Quartet No. 3 (2009) Los Angeles Premiere
        
                                               
Steven Vanhauwaert, piano
Pamela Vliek-Martchev, flute
Calder Quartet
Elissa Johnston, soprano
Alma Lisa Fernandez, viola
Maria Casale, harp

A vaporous shot of dry ice across a raging inferno gives you a sense of the contrasts of this program. Four highly inventive and utterly different American composers are convened here to make strange sense of the world. The Rouse quartets are paragons of high stakes virtuosity and danger. Schuman's muse Shakespeare meditates on the passion of Orpheus. Bennett's mockingbird flute seems capable of inhuman feats. Kirchner offers a most remarkably constructed piano tour de force of wit and wisdom inspired by poems of Emily Dickenson. Premiered by the Calder Quartet, Rouse described his most recent quartet as a drunken schizophrenic having a grand mal seizure.