Vermeer Quartet to bring their soulful strings

On Sunday, the Oberlin community will be treated to a performance by the Vermeer Quartet, one of the world's leading string quartets. The Vermeer was formed in 1969 (the Summer of Love) at the Marlboro Music Festival and has earned a place among the truly international string quartets of our day.

The members of the Vermeer hail from Germany, New York City, Israel, and Nebraska. They studied with renowned teachers Efrem Zmbalist, Emanuel Hurwitz, Joseph Gingold, and Janos Starker. As individuals, they have won prizes at the Tchaikovsky Competition and the Rockefeller Foundation American Music Competition. They have played as soloists with many of the world's leading orchestras. It is beyond question that each of the members of the Vermeer is technically impeccable, highly developed musically and a solid performer. For a string quartet with an international career, this is square one.

The Vermeer's playing has been described by Germany's Suddeutsche Zeitung as "music making that reveals much of the inner self: music making of untamed necessity that goes far beyond that which is merely pleasing to the ear." They have performed at virtually all of the world's most prestigious music festivals, including Tanglewood, Aldeburgh, Mostly Mozart, Aspen, Bath, Lucerne, South Bank, Flanders, Albuquerque, Stresa, Berlin, Schleswig-Holstein, Santa Fe, Edinburgh, Great Woods and Ravina. The quartet makes its home in Chicago and are on the resident artist faculty of Northern Illinois University in Dekalb since 1970.

The repertoire to be performed on Sunday is Hugo Wolf's Italian Serenade,  Elliot Carter's String Quartet No.1  and Debussy's String Quartet in G-minor.  Wolf was an acquaintance of Wagner, Brahms and Mahler. He was part of the late Romantic era in Germany that brought to the world huge works, lush harmony and melody that is so touching and personal, the listener wants it to go on forever (which it does, in Wagner's case).

Wolf is remembered for bringing the German art of Lied (song) to its highest point of development. He wrote the Italian Serenade Quartet in 1887. Elliot Carter was born in New York City and is associated with a group of Greenwich Village composers including Steve Reich and John Zorn. Growing up, Carter was a neighbor to composer Charles Ives, who lit the musical spark in Carter.

Carter gained world-wide acclaim for his development of the technique of polyrhythm, which uses a large-scale counterpoint to create a structure of irregular cross-accents. This technique, which Carter calls metrical modulation, culminated in his String Quartet no. 1, and Carter's second and third string quartets both won Pulitzer Prizes.

Debussy is famous for thumbing his nose at classical harmonic teaching and opting instead for what he said sounded good to him. He lived in Paris and was influenced by the Impressionist and Symbolist movements that were blossoming there and across Europe at the time. Debussy invented a 21 note scale and adopted a new attitude that color and texture could be more important to music than melody. His works are evocative, sometimes whimsical and singularly beautiful.

The Vermeer Quartet is being brought to Oberlin as part of the Artist Recital Series. Although Oberlin does have a world class Conservatory and a fabulous college, it is still rare for such a group to journey to the middle of Ohio. The community should be honored that a quartet as accomplished and recognized as the Vermeer is visiting, and Finney Chapel will, as usual, provide a perfect acoustical setting for what will be a sublime musical experience.

The Vereer String Quartet will perform Sunday, Apr. 27 at Finney Chapel at 8p.m. Tickets are available to students for $10 and $16 for the general public.