Classical Convergence Series
March 26, 2025
7:30pm
Organ Recital Hall

icarus Quartet
Larry Weng and Max Hammond, piano
Matt Keown and Jeff Stern, percussion

Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, Sz. 110, BB 115 (1937) by Béla Bartók (1881-1945)

Variations on a Theme by Paganini (1941) by Witold Lutosławski (1913-1994)
arr. Marta Ptaszynska and icarus Quartet

    ~intermission~

Hagyaték (2023) by Martin Bresnick (b. 1946)

Cloak of Night (2024) by Viet Cuong (b. 1990)

Turbo Shift (A Crafter’s Workshop) (2024) by Jennifer Higdon (b. 1962)

Like the mythological figure from which it draws its name, the half piano/half percussion icarus Quartet dares to fly towards the sun, aspiring to new heights of artistry. Following their Carnegie Hall debut, composer Paul Lansky simply remarked, “This is music making of the highest order.” The Wall Street Journal hailed icarus Quartet’s 2022 album, BIG THINGS, as “a beautifully immersive recording…an impressive calling card.”

Winner of the 2019 Chamber Music Yellow Springs Competition, icarus Quartet has given new life to old masterpieces as well as the future of their instrumentation. The quartet was chosen as Chamber Music Northwest’s 2020 Protégé Project Ensemble and was subsequently the first ensemble to hold the Klinger ElectroAcoustic Residency at Bowling Green State University. Past engagements include appearances at the Kennedy Center’s REACH, the Vienna Summer Music Festival, the Horowitz Piano Series, the Queens New Music Festival, the São Paulo Contemporary Composers Festival, the Adalman Chamber Series, and at Princeton University for a Lansky tribute concert held in honor of the emeritus professor’s 75th birthday.

Fostering the development of new works through commissioning and collaborating lies at the core of the group’s mission, inspiring partnerships with titans of the classical contemporary field, established artists of electronic and indie music scenes, as well as gifted student composers through their annual “iQ Tests” program. Recent and upcoming collaborators include Andy Akiho, Amy Beth Kirsten, Nick Zammuto, Viet Cuong, Michael Laurello, Martin Bresnick, and Jennifer Higdon as well as 2024-25 iQ Test Scholars Boggy Ge and Erik Texter. The ensemble’s work often extends beyond the realm of music; Wilderness Suite, an ongoing intermedia project combining icarus Quartet with the forces of composer Ruby Fulton, geographer Teresa Cavazos-Cohn, and eight independent video artists, examines the unique anti-development of the 2.4 million-acre Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness site through still imagery, data, film, recorded interviews, natural sound samples, and live music.

Passionate about educating and engaging with the next generation of musicians, icarus Quartet thrives in school and university settings. They have given classes on chamber music and composition seminars on writing for their instruments at institutions including the Peabody Conservatory, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Bridgeport University, the University of Florida, the University of Northern Iowa, Florida State University, Lebanon Valley College, Yale College, Wright State University, and the University of Idaho’s Lionel Hampton School of Music, in addition to presentations for grade school and Pre-K students.

Larry Weng, Max Hammond, Matt Keown, and Jeff Stern are all celebrated soloists in their own rights, and together they have found a special chemistry and inimitable joy playing chamber music. They are dedicated to the discovery, creation, and performance of new music, but what distinguishes their approach to contemporary music is a strong training and background in the classical genre. icarus Quartet is committed to performing new works with a studied and convincing interpretation that mirrors the validity of works with performance practices developed over centuries.

Béla Bartók
Béla Bartók was born in the Hungarian town of Nagyszentmiklós (now Sînnicolau Mare in Romania) in March 1881, and received his first instruction in music from his mother, a very capable pianist; his father, the headmaster of a local school, was also musical. After his family moved to Pressburg (now Bratislava in Slovakia) in 1894, he took lessons from László Erkel, son of Ferenc Erkel, Hungary’s first important operatic composer, and in 1899 he became a student at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest, graduating in 1903. His teachers there were János Koessler, a friend of Brahms, for composition and István Thoman for piano. Bartók, who had given his first public concert at the age of eleven, now began to establish a reputation as a fine pianist that spread well beyond Hungary’s borders, and he was soon drawn into teaching: in 1907 he replaced Thoman as professor of piano in the Academy.

Béla Bartók’s earliest compositions offer a blend of late Romanticism and nationalist elements, formed under the influences of Wagner, Brahms, Liszt and Strauss, and resulting in works such as Kossuth, an expansive symphonic poem written when he was 23. Around 1905 his friend and fellow-composer Zoltán Kodály directed his attention to Hungarian folk music and, coupled with his discovery of the music of Debussy, Bartók’s musical language changed dramatically: it acquired greater focus and purpose – though initially it remained very rich, as his opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (1911) and ballet The Wooden Prince (1917) demonstrate. But as he absorbed more and more of the spirit of Hungarian folk songs and dances, his own music grew tighter, more concentrated, chromatic and dissonant – and although a sense of key is sometimes lost in individual passages, Bartók never espoused atonality as a compositional technique.

His interest in folk music was not merely passive: Bartók was an assiduous ethnomusicologist, his first systematic collecting trips in Hungary being undertaken with Kodály, and in 1906 they published a volume of the songs they had collected. Thereafter Bartók’s involvement grew deeper and his scope wider, encompassing a number of ethnic traditions both near at hand and further afield: Transylvanian, Romanian, North African, and others.

In the 1920s and ’30s Bartók’s international fame spread, and he toured widely, both as pianist (usually in his own works) and as a respected composer. Works like the Dance Suite for orchestra (1923), the Cantata profana (1934) and the Divertimento for strings (1939), commissioned by Paul Sacher, maintained his high profile; indeed, he earned some notoriety when the Nazis banned his ballet The Miraculous Mandarin (1918–19) because of its sexually explicit plot. He continued to teach at the Academy of Music until his resignation in 1934, devoting much of his free time thereafter to his ethnomusicological research. 

With the outbreak of the Second World War, and despite his deep attachment to his homeland, life in Hungary became intolerable and Bartók and his second wife, Ditta Pásztory, emigrated to the United States. Here his material conditions worsened considerably, despite initial promise: although he obtained a post at Columbia University and was able to pursue his folk-music studies, his concert engagements became very much rarer, and he received few commissions. Koussevitzky’s request for a Concerto for Orchestra (1943) was therefore particularly important, bringing him much-needed income. Bartók’s health was now failing, but he was nonetheless able virtually to complete his Third Piano Concerto and sketch out a Viola Concerto before his death from polycythemia (a form of leukemia) in September 1945.

Béla Bartók is published by Boosey & Hawkes. Reprinted by kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes.

Witold Lutosławski
Witold Lutosławski was indisputably one of the major composers of the twentieth century. Born in Warsaw in 1913, he showed prodigious musical and intellectual talent from an early age. His composition studies in Warsaw ended at a politically difficult time for Poland so his plans for further study in Paris were replaced by a period which included military training, imprisonment by the Germans and escape back to Warsaw, where he and his compatriot Andrzej Panufnik played in cafes their own compositions and transcriptions. After the war, the Stalinist regime banned his first symphony (1941-47) as 'formalist', but he continued to compose and in 1958 his Musique Funèbre, in memory of Bartok, established his international reputation. His own personal aleatoric technique whereby the performers have freedom within certain controlled parameters was first demonstrated in his Jeux Venitiens (1961) and is to be found in almost all the later music Over the years, Witold Lutosławski was frequently inspired by particular ensembles and artists including the London Sinfonietta, Sir Peter Pears, Heinz and Ursula Holliger, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Mstislav Rostropovich and Anne-Sophie Mutter. His Symphony No. 4 was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and received its world premiere in February 1993 under the baton of the composer. A powerful work, it reflected his increasing concern with expansive melody. Among many international prizes awarded to this most modest man were the UNESCO Prize (1959,1968), the French order of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres (1982), Grawemeyer Award (1985), Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal (1986), in the last year of his life, the Swedish Polar Music Prize and the Inamori Foundation Prize, Kyoto, for his outstanding contribution to contemporary European music, and, posthumously, the International Music Award for best large-scale composition for the fourth symphony. Lutosławski's contribution to the musical world was enormous and his loss in February 1994, at the age of 81, will continue to be deeply felt.

– Chester Music

Martin Bresnick
Martin Bresnick has been writing a large, diverse roster of works that are admired by performers across America - music that seems at once ancient, elegiac and awesomely new - listen and you will hear." (Anthony Tomassini, The New York Times)

Bresnick was born in New York City in 1946. His compositions - from opera, dance, choral, chamber and symphonic music to film scores and computer music - are performed throughout the world. He delights in reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable, bringing together repetitive gestures derived from minimalism with a harmonic palette that encompasses both highly chromatic sounds and more open, consonant harmonies and a raw power reminiscent of rock. 

Bresnick’s orchestral music has been performed by the National Symphony, Chicago Symphony, American Composers Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, New Haven Symphony, Münster Philharmonic, Kiel Philharmonic, Orchestra of the Radio Televisione Italiana, Orchestra New England, City of London Chamber Orchestra, Orquestra Sinfonica do Estado de Sao Paulo, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Oregon Symphony Orchestra, Bilbao Orkestra Sinfonika, and Izumi Sinfonietta Osaka, Fairfax Symphony, New Haven Symphony, and the Australian Youth Orchestra. His chamber and choral music has been performed in concert by The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, The Crossing Choir, Sonor, Da Capo Chamber Players, Speculum Musicae; Bang on A Can All-Stars, Nash Ensemble, MusicWorks!, Zeitgeist, Musical Elements, Alarm Will Sound, Double Entendre, Tactus, Le Train Bleu, White Ibis Ensemble, The Viney-Grinberg Piano Duo, New Morse Code, NakedEye Ensemble, TwoSense, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Chamber Music Northwest, Yale Choral Artists, Prism Saxophone Quartet, Great Noise Ensemble, Brentano String Quartet, Third Coast Percussion, Sō Percussion, Icarus Quartet, Crux Duo, and Plexus Trio.

Bresnick has written music for films - two of which, Arthur & Lillie (1975) and The Day After Trinity (1981) were nominated for Academy Awards in the documentary category (both with Jon Else, director). Other films include Cadillac Desert, Mohammed - Legacy of a Prophet, The Botany of Desire, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens - Man Made Out Of Words.

Festivals throughout the world have featured Bresnick’s music: New York Philharmonic Biennial Festival, Bang on a Can, Big Ears Festival, Chautauqua Festival, Tanglewood, Olavsfest (Trondheim Norway), Oviedo New Music Festival (Spain), International Navy Saxophone Symposium, Missouri Chamber Music Festival, Evolution Contemporary Music Series, Tura New Music Festival Perth (Australia), International Festival of Arts and Ideas (New Haven), Sonic Boom, Adelaide, Sydney, Israel, Prague Spring, South Bank's Meltdown (London), Almeida, Melbourne Metropolis, Turin, Banff, Norfolk, ISCM, New Music America, New York Philharmonic New Horizons, and Red Note New Music Festival.

Bresnick’s prizes and commissions include the inaugural Charles Ives Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Rome Prize, The Berlin Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Koussevitzky Commission, Fulbright Fellowship, three N.E.A. Composer Grants, A.S.C.A.P. Awards, MacDowell Colony Fellowship, Morse Fellowship from Yale University, First Prize - Premio Ancona, First Prize - International Sinfonia Musicale Competition, Connecticut Commission on the Arts Grant with Chamber Music America (1983), two First Prizes, Composers Inc. Competitions, Semi-finalist - Friedheim Awards, The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center Elise L. Stoeger Prize for Chamber Music, Composer-in Residence, American Academy In Rome. 

Bresnick is recognized as an influential teacher of composition. Students from every part of the globe and of virtually every musical inclination have been inspired by his critical encouragement. He is currently a professor at the Yale University School of Music, where he has been a widely influential teacher of contemporary composition since 1981. His teaching has been recognized by a Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching at Stanford University, ASCAP Foundation's Aaron Copland Prize for Teaching, and the Yale School of Music’s highest honor - the Sanford Medal for Service to Music.

Educated at the High School of Music and Art NYC, University of Hartford (B.A. '67), Stanford University (M.A. '68, D.M.A. '72), and the Akademie für Musik, Vienna ('69-'70), Bresnick’s principal teachers of composition include György Ligeti, John Chowning, and Gottfried von Einem. 

Martin Bresnick is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His compositions are published exclusively by Carl Fischer Music Publishers, New York; Bote & Bock, Berlin; CommonMuse Music Publishers, New Haven. They have been recorded on Cantaloupe Music, New World Records, Albany Records, Bridge Records, Tall Poppies, Composers Recordings Incorporated, Centaur, Starkland Records, and Artifact Music. www.martinbresnick.com

Viet Cuong
The “alluring” (The New York Times), “arresting” (Gramophone), “irresistible” (San Francisco Chronicle), and “exhilarating” (Chicago Tribune) music of Vietnamese-American composer Viet Cuong (b. 1990) has been commissioned and performed on six continents by musicians and ensembles such as the New York Philharmonic, Eighth Blackbird, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Sō Percussion, Alarm Will Sound, Atlanta Symphony, Sandbox Percussion, Albany Symphony, PRISM Quartet, and Dallas Winds, among many others. Cuong’s music has been featured in venues such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, National Gallery of Art, and Library of Congress, and his works for wind ensemble have amassed several hundreds of performances worldwide, including at Midwest, WASBE, and CBDNA conferences.

In his music Cuong enjoys exploring the unexpected and whimsical, and he is often drawn to projects where he can make peculiar combinations and sounds feel enchanting or oddly satisfying. His notable works thus include concerti for tuba and dueling oboes, percussion quartets utilizing wine glasses and sandpaper, and pieces for double reed sextet, cello octet, and solo snare drum. This eclecticism extends to the variety of musical groups he writes for, and he has worked closely with ensembles ranging from middle school bands to Grammy-winning orchestras and chamber ensembles. His wind ensemble works are widely performed, having been programmed by the world’s preeminent wind bands such as the Dallas Winds and military bands including the United States Navy Band, “President’s Own” Marine Band, “Pershing’s Own” Army Band, Army Field Band, Coast Guard Band, and Air Force Band. These works have also been performed by the top wind ensembles at academic institutions such as the University of Texas at Austin, University of Michigan, University of North Texas, Louisiana State University, University of Miami, and Michigan State University. Passionate about bringing all these different facets of the contemporary music community together, his recent works include Vital Sines, a concerto for Eighth Blackbird and the United States Navy Band, and Re(new)al, a concerto for percussion quartet with a variety of ensemble accompaniments.

Cuong is the Pacific Symphony’s current Composer-in-Residence, and from 2020-23 was the California Symphony’s Young American Composer-in-Residence. He has held artist residencies at Copland House, Yaddo, Ucross, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and at Dumbarton Oaks, where he served as the 2020 Early-Career Musician-in-Residence. His music has been awarded the Barlow Prize, William D. Revelli Prize, Frederick Fennell Prize, Walter Beeler Memorial Prize, Barlow Endowment Commission, ASCAP Morton Gould Composers Award, Theodore Presser Foundation Award, Suzanne and Lee Ettelson Composers Award, Cortona Prize, New York Youth Symphony First Music Commission, and Boston GuitarFest Composition Prize.

Cuong serves as Assistant Professor of Music Composition and Theory the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he teaches composition, orchestration, and music theory. He holds degrees in music composition from Princeton University (MFA/PhD), the Curtis Institute of Music (Artist Diploma), and the Peabody Conservatory (BM/MM). His mentors include Jennifer Higdon, David Serkin Ludwig, Donnacha Dennehy, Steve Mackey, Dan Trueman, Dmitri Tymoczko, Kevin Puts, and Oscar Bettison. During his studies, he held the Daniel W. Dietrich II Composition Fellowship at Curtis, Naumburg and Roger Sessions Fellowships at Princeton, and Evergreen House Foundation scholarship at Peabody, where he was also awarded the Peabody Alumni Award (the Valedictorian honor) and Gustav Klemm Award. A scholarship student at the Aspen, Bowdoin, and Lake Champlain music festivals, Cuong has been a fellow at the Orchestra of St. Luke’s DeGaetano Institute, Minnesota Orchestra Composers Institute, Mizzou International Composers Festival, Eighth Blackbird Creative Lab, Cabrillo Festival’s Young Composer Workshop, Cortona Sessions, and Copland House’s CULTIVATE workshop.

Jennifer Higdon
Pulitzer Prize and three-time Grammy-winner Jennifer Higdon (b. Brooklyn, NY, December 31, 1962) taught herself to play flute at the age of 15 and began formal musical studies at 18, with an even later start in composition at the age of 21. Despite these obstacles, Jennifer has become a major figure in contemporary Classical music. Her works represent a wide range of genres, from orchestral to chamber, to wind ensemble, as well as vocal, choral and opera. Her music has been hailed by Fanfare Magazine as having "the distinction of being at once complex, sophisticated but readily accessible emotionally", with the Times of London citing it as "…traditionally rooted, yet imbued with integrity and freshness." The League of American Orchestras reports that she is one of America's most frequently performed composers.

Higdon's list of commissioners is extensive and includes The Philadelphia Orchestra, The Chicago Symphony, The Atlanta Symphony, The Cleveland Orchestra, The Minnesota Orchestra, The Pittsburgh Symphony, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, as well such groups as the Tokyo String Quartet, the Lark Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, and the President's Own Marine Band. She has also written works for such artists as baritone Thomas Hampson, pianists Yuja Wang and Gary Graffman, violinists Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, Jennifer Koh and Hilary Hahn. Her first opera, Cold Mountain, won the prestigious International Opera Award for Best World Premiere in 2016; the first American opera to do so in the award's history. Performances of Cold Mountain sold out its premiere run in Santa Fe, North Carolina, and Philadelphia (becoming the third highest selling opera in Opera Philadelphia's history).

Higdon received the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her Violin Concerto, with the committee citing the work as "a deeply engaging piece that combines flowing lyricism with dazzling virtuosity." She has also received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Koussevitzky Foundation, the Pew Fellowship in the Arts, The Independence Foundation, the NEA, and ASCAP. As winner of the Van Cliburn Piano Competition's American Composers Invitational, Higdon's Secret & Glass Gardens was performed by the semi-finalists during the competition.

Higdon has been a featured composer at many festivals including Aspen, Tanglewood, Vail, Norfolk, Grand Teton, and Cabrillo. She has served as Composer-in-Residence with several orchestras, including the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Fort Worth Symphony. She was honored to serve as the Creative Director of the Boundless Series for the Cincinnati Symphony's 2012-13 season. During the 2016-17 and 2017-18 academic years Higdon served as the prestigious Barr Laureate Scholar at the University of Missouri Kansas City.

In 2018, Higdon received the Eddie Medora King Award from the University of Texas, Austin. That same year, she received the prestigious Nemmers Prize from Northwestern University which is awarded to contemporary classical composers of exceptional achievement who have significantly influenced the field of composition.

Higdon enjoys more than 200 performances a year of her works. Her orchestral work, blue cathedral, is the most performed contemporary orchestral works in the repertoire, more than 600 performances since its premiere in 2000.

Her works have been recorded on over 70 CDs. Higdon has won three Grammys in her career for Best Contemporary Classical Composition: first for her Percussion Concerto in 2010, in 2018 for her Viola Concerto and in 2020 for her Harp Concerto.

Dr. Higdon received a Bachelor's Degree in Music from Bowling Green State University, an Artist Diploma from The Curtis Institute of Music, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. She has been awarded honorary doctorates from the Hartt School and Bowling Green State University.

Dr. Higdon's music is published exclusively by Lawdon Press.

For more information, visit www.jenniferhigdon.com

Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion:
Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion is one of his most acclaimed masterpieces and stands as a seminal work in the 20th-century classical music repertoire. Written in 1937, the piece was premiered with Bartók and his wife playing the two piano parts. Later Bartók rewrote the work as a concerto for two pianos and orchestra, but as it is most often played in its original form, the work is generally considered a chamber piece. Bartók called it a “sonata” because he did not know whether the percussion part would require two or three players and thus circumvented the word “quartet.” He later found that two percussionists were sufficient but kept the title nonetheless.

The piece’s instrumentation is quite unusual and caused Bartók much trepidation in how it would be performed and received. He had a fascination with percussion that came partly from Stravinsky and partly from Varèse, but what influenced him most were the percussive timbres and colors of the Far East and Africa. As for the piano, Bartók had an intimate relationship to the instrument, being a teacher, performer, and composer of it. In his two piano concerti written prior to the sonata, he experimented with the percussive nature of the piano by occasionally matching it with the percussion section of the orchestra. In this sonata, the piano’s percussiveness is exploited to its fullest. Bartók chose to have two pianos instead of one in order to take advantage of antiphonal possibilities between them. He may have also been thinking of the prospect of performing the piece with his wife.

The first movement opens with an ominous, circular, seven-note theme that gradually gains momentum until a dramatic arrival at the allegro section, where the two pianos shout in rhythmic unison. From there the movement, whose length takes up half the entire piece, is a series of climaxes within extended sonata form. In the midst, a rising sixth motive appears like a horn call and is present throughout the rest of the movement, including as the subject of a fugato at the end.

The second movement is an example of Bartók’s signature “Night music,” also heard in such pieces as his third piano concerto and his concerto for orchestra. In Night music, instruments simulate the sounds of nature at night, which may include anything from evoking a nocturnal aesthetic to portraying actual nighttime noises. This second movement opens with a sturdy rhythm from the percussion that sets the mood for a spacious, dark melody from the pianos. A second section introduces nocturnal creatures through short quintuplet figures that rap over bell-like chords. The movement is ternary form, though when the opening section returns it sounds like a dream sequence by way of the rippling scales and tremolos rolling around it. The return also brings with it the percussion’s steady, square beat.

To contrast, the music of the last movement evokes the brightest of sunshine. The xylophone first introduces a folk-like melody that is more diatonic and linear than the chromatic and circuitous first movement theme. The movement is full of humor, irony, and energy. At the end, a steady, slowly fading snare drum ostinato sounds as if a marching band drummer is walking away, and a surprising, delightful C major chord in the upper registers of the pianos gives the piece finality with a smile.

– Laura Usiskin

Variations on a Theme by Paganini:
As good luck would have it, Witold Lutosławski did not spend World War II in a German prison camp, even though his status as a minor officer in the Polish Army would have normally assured it. Instead, when Poland was invaded (Soviets from the east and Nazis from every other direction) and he was initially captured, he managed an escape on foot to his home in Warsaw 400 kilometers away. Although this left him without an official identity for the rest of the war, he managed to make ends meet teaming up with local cabaret performers and playing in small clubs. Larger music venues in Nazi-occupied Warsaw were more carefully monitored.

Making the best of an otherwise intolerable situation, another pianist and composer destined to be a giant of Polish music after the war, Andrzej Panufnik (1914-1991), formed a piano duo with Lutosławski. The two composers performed in a handful of popular and famous nightclubs for the next few years, with Lutosławski arranging over 200 pieces for them.

Finally, in anticipation of the momentous and devastating 1944 Warsaw Uprising (which led to the Nazis systematically demolishing 85 percent of the city and executing several hundreds of thousands of people), both Lutosławski and Panufnik wisely fled to less populated areas, taking with them only their most essential possessions. Among the few music scores that Lutosławski managed to carry out to safety (all others now presumed destroyed), only one was from the 200 arrangements for his piano duo: Variations on a Theme by Paganini (1941).

Part humorous parody and part furious display of virtuosity, this theme and eleven variations, with an added twelfth variation and finale, pokes fun at the fact that even a nightclub audience will probably recognize the catchy tune from the 24th Caprice by Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840). An abrupt tempo change in variation six proves to be an embellishment compared to the original, although this also reflects that over the centuries countless different versions of this Caprice have been created.

Further humor derives from exploiting that the original Caprice serves the primary purpose of showcasing a catalogue of effects only playable on a violin. The pianists nonetheless mimic at least symbolically pizzicato, harmonics, double stops, and other effects proceeding moment to moment through each of the original variations, polychords, and other dissonant anachronisms ironically compensating for the faux instrumental character.

— Gregg Wager

Hagyaték:
“Hagyaték, the title of my composition, is the Hungarian word for "Legacy." In this work, commissioned by and dedicated to the icarus Quartet, I honor my most direct musical ancestors, Béla Bartók and György Ligeti, the influence of whose imaginative and exhilarating compositions are not far to seek. Also present is a sonorous memory trace of my friend, the composer Loren Rush. The only legacy or Hagyaték worthy of the name must not only derive from but also extend and engage the energies of its still vital source. May it be so with Hagyaték!”

– Martin Bresnick

Cloak of Night:

“This piece owes something to Béla Bartók. After all, he chose the instruments. The commission, from my friends in the wonderful icarus Quartet, called for a response to his Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. More specifically, I was asked to respond to the second movement, an exemplar of Bartók’s “Night Music.” With this somber, eerie selection as my point of departure, the prismatic work that emerged stands in rather stark contrast. Cloak of Night is imbued with the energy of its own creation — sometimes anxious, often ecstatic, and always looking ahead. The title nods to Bartók, but more refers to its compositional process, with the work being done mostly in those darkest hours of night, with all the lonely secrecy they afford.”

– Viet Cuong

Turbo Shift (A Crafter’s Workshop)

“Imagine you are a very small drone, flying around a somewhat magical clock maker’s workshop. As you move through the air, you see all sorts of mechanical inventions, lying around in full form or in partial construction – tiny pieces and very large ones. And sitting at his desk is the maker himself… carefully constructing new gizmos and fixing old ones. He is meticulous – carefully notating every MEASURE of the small, intricate parts that go into his masterpieces. There is a joy in his dreaming up new creations: figuring out what can be put in, and what must be left out, and how much crafting each piece takes to make a spectacular thing.

While the tools of our craftsman are laid out neatly upon a work desk, a look around reveals a workshop where there are many projects in process. Two obvious things: a complexity of ideas and joy in the making.

I have always felt that Bartók was just such a master craftsman. Studying his Sonata, I found the third movement to be some of his most joyous music. In tribute, I have built a piece on fragments, progressions, rhythms, and intervallic relationships from that particular movement. So hang on for a turbo speed journey in honor of a crafter and his workshop.

Turbo Shift, subtitled A Crafter’s Workshop, is dedicated to the gifted, meticulous, and imaginative icarus Quartet.”

— Jennifer Higdon