Extending String Quartet: Fellow Travelers
with Ragazze Quartet
Ragazze Quartet
Rosa Arnold (violin)
Jeanita Vriens-van Tongeren (violin)
Annemijn Bergkotte (viola)
Rebecca Wise (cello)
Antonín Dvořák
String Quartet no. 12 ‘American Quartet’
Béla Bartók
String Quartet no. 2
Yevgeniy Sharlat
Pencil Sketch
Against a backdrop of photos, the Ragazze Quartet plays music by composers with an American history: Fellow Travelers. Dvořák pursued fortune, Bartók was on the run. Both couldn’t settle in the New World, but they wrote some of their most beautiful compositions there.
The youngest work on the program is by Yevgeniy Sharlat. Born in Moscow, he also built a life in the United States. For Fifty for the Future, the grand project of the Kronos Quartet in which fifty composers were asked to write a new piece, Sharlat wrote his Pencil Sketch. Each player needs two pencils with erasers at the end for the performance.