Imagine yourself before a painting by Vermeer. The light is soft, yet penetrating. The captured moment is inward, almost clandestine, yet here we are gazing into it, in relationship with it. The scene is simple, mundane even, yet replete with intricate detail, rewarding close attention. The intimacy of the experience, unassuming and direct, can also be piercingly emotional. We see the painting; simultaneously it seems to see into us. 

This blending of interiority with revelation, this clarity of vision melding the rational and the instinctive, is a quality often evinced by the English music of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. We, as a string quartet, have in our ancestry the plaintive, pungent voices of the viol family, as well as the idea of the viol consort as an intimate gathering of friends conversing, cavorting and entangling strands of sense and sound. Our group has long been enriched by exploring this repertoire, enjoying the vibrant camaraderie and the frisson of lines that lean into each other as they both frolic and keen. The song repertoire of the period is, if anything, even more vulnerable, delicate and disarmingly pellucid. Gathering works here by composers Henry Purcell, John Dowland, Matthew Locke, Thomas Tomkins, William Byrd and Robert Johnson (who supplied music for Shakespeare’s productions) gives us a chance to shrink the concert hall into a parlor, to invite our audience to be our confidantes. The music combines elements of the public and the private; the listener can eavesdrop on the proceedings, can get drawn into the conversations and collisions, the friendliness and the frictions. 

And with whom better to do this than Dawn Upshaw, a treasured collaborator of ours? When she sings, Dawn has a way of making you feel she is speaking plainly, with utter candor, right to you, so beautifully suited to music both confessional and personal. The first half of our collaborative program weaves together instrumental and vocal music, starting and ending with Purcell arias on love and loss. The final aria, the perennially beloved Dido’s Lament, opens the door for the great new monodrama on the second half, Melinda Wagner and Stephanie Fleischmann’s Dido Reimagined, a reexamination of the archetypal figure of Dido, an operatic investigation drawn into the world of chamber music. It is with great gratitude for this new work and great excitement for the opportunity to discover it and bring it to life that we offer this program.

—Note by Mark Steinberg