Get to know the composers: Mozart, Reed Parry & Shostakovich
Well folks - this is it! Our season officially starts tomorrow!! Our first show is this Saturday in Moncton. We’ve got a powerful program to start off the new year — some Mozart, a cool piece by Canadian composer Richard Reed Parry (where we wear stethoscopes!) and Shostakovich’s famous String Quartet No. 8. This is going to be a fun run of shows!
Tickets are available, and there’s still time to grab a season pass!
A heads up to folks who like to get tickets at the door:
We wanted to let you know that this year, there is a slight increase in ticket prices at the door.
How come? We’ve recently had to begin collecting HST on our ticket sales, and to save our lovely volunteers at the door the hassle of looking for small change, we’re rounded up the pricing slightly.
If you’d like to save a little on our ticket prices, please purchase your tickets in advance! This also helps us TREMENDOUSLY. We have a small team (it’s literally us, hah!) so a simple action like buying tickets ahead of time gives us the peace of mind of knowing folks will be at the show! Since many of our venues are small and intimate, buying tickets in advance also helps us plan ahead so we don’t go over capacity (a nice problem to have, truly!).
Don’t have a credit card? Or find buying tickets online a hassle? That’s ok! Send us an email and we’ll be in touch to sort out an easier way for you to get advance tickets.
Thanks for your understanding, folks, and see you soon!
2025-26 prices:
Adults: $25+hst | $30 at the door
Seniors: $20+hst | $25 at the door
Students: $15+hst | $20 at the door
Sistema & NBYO Students & Faculty: Free
Richard Reed Parry - Quartet for Heart and Breath (2009)
Richard Reed Parry is a Canadian composer best known as one of the members of the art-rock band Arcade Fire. In between world tours in the mid-aughts, Reed Parry would work on a series of compositions that all had the same conceptual starting point: every note would be played in sync with the heartbeat or breath of the musicians.
The idea for Parry’s concept came about after listening to music that he didn’t feel any profound connection to. “The whole idea just came from being in school, and finding myself unable to really engage with any of the music that we were studying,” he recalls. “There was all this electro-acoustic music, and I just found that it totally disconnected me with anything physical… When I found myself in a class, listening to music that was so abstract that it was divorced from any sense of real presence, my mind began to wander; I started to think, what would be the opposite of this? What could I create that would be the most in-your-body music possible; I mean, what would that feel like?”
His answer to this was surprisingly simple, and also surprisingly unexplored in the classical music canon up until that point – to make music that is intimately connected to musicians’ bodies, where the performers play along to the involuntary rhythms of their own bodies. To facilitate this, the musicians wear stethoscopes while they are performing so they can clearly hear their own heartbeats, which in turn regulate their individual tempos. The natural variance between heart rates results in a kind of delicate musical “pointillism,” where the music falls in and out of sync. In this sense, the piece is never performed exactly the same way twice.
Quartet for Heart and Breath is one of these pieces - a gorgeous meditative work that was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by the 2009 MusicNOW Festival. The collection of these pieces was released on Deutsche Grammophon in 2014 - not a bad starting point for a debut solo album!
Here’s a wonderful mini-doc that goes deeper into Richard’s work.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - String Quartet No. 15, K. 421 (1783)
Mozart’s String Quartet No. 15, K. 421 was the second of a collection of six string quartets that he dedicated to his friend, colleague and mentor Joseph Haydn. Dedicating these to a friend instead of an aristocrat (which at the time was a wise fiscal choice) underscored the special bond shared by the men. 34 years apart in age, Mozart and Haydn were known to have a close friendship - they first met in 1783 while Haydn was peak celebrity in musical Europe and Mozart a rising star. The two immediately struck up a friendship and regularly read quartets with other local composers. Mozart began composing this collection not long after meeting Haydn (who had singlehandedly invented the quartet genre, no pressure!).
The Haydn collection were the greatest of Mozart's quartets, and arguably the greatest quartets by any composer up until then. The No. 15 is a particular jewel amongst the 6, being the only quartet in a minor key. Minor keys were used carefully at the time – they were seen as severe and intense, and composers used them sparingly so they wouldn’t overwhelm audiences. No. 15 uses a minor key throughout 3 of the 4 movements, and is seen as among the most intense of Mozart's works – perhaps the most intense quartet in existence until Beethoven came along. After attending the quartet’s premiere, Haydn told Mozart’s father: “before God and as an honest man I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name.”
Another fun fact about No. 15 – it’s said to have been completed while his wife was in labour with their first child. Matching its inception at such an emotional moment, K.421 is unrelentingly dramatic. The recurring rising theme in the second movement is meant to allude to his wife Constanze’s cries of pain while Mozart studiously scribbled away at the quartet.
Dmitri Shostakovich -
String Quartet No. 8 (1960)
Dmitri Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8 is regarded as one of the most profound quartets of the 20th century. Written in 1960 over the span of only three days, the quartet is seen as a response to a period of personal and political turmoil, subtitled “To the victims of facism and war.” The genesis and the meaning of the dedication has been debated over the years – written only 7 years after the terror of Stalin’s dictatorial rule ended, it can be easily interpreted as a sonorous requiem for that period of mass suffering. Shostakovich’s son Maxim interprets this as a reference to the victims of all totalitarianism, while his daughter thought of it as autobiographical, chronicling the composer’s own struggles against Stalinism.
There is no doubt that the piece was deeply personal. Shostakovich once confessed to a friend; “I started thinking that if some day I die, nobody is likely to write a work in memory of me, so I had better write one myself.” Like an epitaph, the quartet is literally built on the composer’s name, using his famous musical monogram DSCH as the primary theme throughout the piece (consisting of the notes D, E-flat, C, B natural, which in German music notation D, Es, C, H, representing the composer's initials: D. Sch). The piece is also imbued with quotations from his other past work - snippets of his cello concerto, his piano trio, two of his symphonies and his infamous opera Lady Macbeth, implying some autobiographical intent.
Known for his dark humour, Shostakovich wrote to a friend that “while I was composing [this quartet] I shed the same amount of tears as I would have to pee after half-a-dozen beers.” But his self-defacing humour had truth in it - when the Borodin Quartet played him the piece for the first at his Moscow home, he was moved to tears by the realisation of his most personal feelings. When they finished playing, he was overcome, and left the room, unable to offer any comments.
Program
String Quartet No. 15, K. 421 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
I. Allegro moderato
II. Andante
III. Menuetto and Trio
IV. Allegretto ma non troppo - Più allegro
Quartet for Heart and Breath Richard Reed Parry
- Intermission -
String Quartet No. 8 in C minor, Op. 110 Dmitri Shostakovich
I. Largo
II. Allegro molto
III. Allegretto
IV. Largo
V. Largo