We're thrilled to welcome violist Kim Kashkashian to Providence next week! A recent addition to CMW's Advisory Council, Kim will join the Providence String Quartet for two performances of the Brahms Viola Quintet in F Major, first at the John Hope Settlement House on Friday evening and then at The RISD Museum on Saturday.

In recent seasons, Kim has appeared as soloist with the major orchestras
of New York, Berlin, Vienna, London, Milan, Munich and Tokyo. She has
performed recitals at the Metropolitan Museum and the 92nd Street "Y" in
New York City, in Boston, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San
Francisco, Cleveland and Los Angeles. Kim has performed with
the Tokyo, Guarneri, and Galimir Quartets, and toured with a quartet
which included Gidon Kremer, Daniel Phillips, and
Yo-Yo Ma.

Her extensive teaching activities have included professorships
at the University of Indiana and in Freiburg and Berlin, Germany. In
2000, she joined the faculty of the New England Conservatory in Boston.

Click here to listen to a recent interview with Kim on National Public Radio.

Excerpt from an email from Kathy Swann, President of the Rhode Island Civic Chorale and Orchestra:

RICCO has named Community MusicWorks as the designated organization to receive a portion
of the proceeds from our golf tournament. We are so pleased to support
your important work with children and music! It is
especially important for RICCO to support youth string programs because
we have a commitment to perform with live orchestra, using composers'
instrumentation and not score reductions. Our mission is to promote
great music through performances with chorus and orchestra and through
outreach to young people. This is the first time we've decided to
include fund raising for a youth music program in our own work and I am
so glad that Community MusicWorks will be our partner in this.

To learn more about the RICCO's benefit golf tournament and dinner on Sunday, June 13, please click here to download an informational flier or visit the RICCO's website.

The Providence String Quartet will perform and discuss Bartok's String Quartet No. 5 in a "preview" event at the Providence Athenaeum on Wednesday, May 12. Visit CMW's website calendar for details.

Having transcribed and cataloged thousands of folk songs from all over Eastern Europe and even some from North Africa, Béla Bartók, along with his compatriot and colleague Zoltán Kodály, invented the field of ethnomusicology. Bartók’s music is an amazing synthesis of traditional Western-tonality and authentic Eastern European/Magyar folk music.

Bartók's String Quartet No. 5 is composed in five movements in a large, palindromic structure. At the core of the quartet is quickly flowing scherzo with a distinctive Bulgarian swing of 9 beats to a bar distributed in a limping 4+2+3. The inner wings of the quartet are slow hypnotic examples of Bartók’s “Night Music,” the sounds of the Hungarian countryside in the evening with bugs, birds, and things that croak. The outer wings are a sonata form first movement and a rondo finale. The first movement itself is a palindrome as the three themes from the exposition are restated in the recapitulation in reverse order and upside down!  The finale zips along with tremendous force until a banal hurdy-gurdy gives pause before the final thrust to the finish. 

Commissioned by the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation in Washington, Bartók wrote his Fifth String Quartet in an unusually short amount of time, from August 6 to September 6, 1934. The Quartet received it’s premier in Washington by the Kolisch Quartet on April 8, 1935.

-Jesse Holstein, PSQ

To read about Sebastian's 3-month sabbatical, click here.