The Cypress String Quartet. (Photo courtesy of Sitka Summer Music Festival)
The Sitka Summer Music Festival began with gusto this week. For the first half of the month-long chamber music residency, the Cypress String Quartet will be performing all of Beethoven’s 16 string quartets. These performances are extra special because they are among the last for the San Francisco-based group, which has been performing for two decades.
Composer Ludwig van Beethoven wrote 16 string quartets throughout the course his life. And for classical musicians, playing those pieces is like climbing Mount Everest.
Here’s violinist Tom Stone and cellist Jennifer Kloetzel of the Cypress String Quartet:
“For us, it’s sort of a personal test and challenge to see if we can keep all of the music in our head,” Stone said.
“And fingers,” Kloetzel said.
“And it’s also almost like a transformational spiritual experience for us to do it,” Stone continued. “After you accomplish something really great you change as a person and I think for all of us we wanted to have that experience.”
The body of work makes up some eight hours of music. Stone says the pieces show his transformation as a composer. In Beethoven’s first quartets he is trying to prove himself worthy of the classical tradition, Stone says, and the ones in his later years are more innovative, ushering the era of romanticism in music. Beethoven is the father of romantic music, after all.
“People talk about what are some of the greatest and most moving works of art—these quartets hold up to works of Shakespeare, Da Vinci and others they are just masterpieces,” he said.
Kloetzel says Beethoven was a genius and very cutting edge, and that’s why people are still puzzling his music nearly 200 years after his death.
“Through the course of his life people were responding to his music saying, ‘This is the music of a madman! What is wrong with him?’” she said. “Nobody had done anything like it. He was pushing the envelope on things 100 years before people were trying his same techniques.”
Violinist Cecily Ward and violist Ethan Filner round out the quartet. The musicians played at the Sitka Summer Music Festival a few times before but this year marks their last—and some of their final shows. After 20 years and thousands of concerts, Stone says, the group has decided to disband this summer.
“It feels good to be going out on top, I would say,” he said. “We’re still in our prime as a quartet we made the decision that it was time to move on in our lives and try something else exciting while we still had the energy and mental acuity to do very important work.”
They’ve had a busy year – playing 150 concerts since September and releasing their third CD of Beethoven’s quartets, which completes their audio collection of the composer.
And it looks like, at least for the next week they won’t be getting any breaks. The quartet will be playing every day until their final performance June 11.
Kayla Boettcher is the executive director of Sitka Summer Music Festival.
“This is the beginning of a whole month of extraordinary music all over town and it’s great to be at this point and have the 2016 festival underway,” she said.
The full program schedule is available online at SitkaMusicFestival.org.
