The 9th Street String Quartet joins us at St. Francis Episcopal in Great Falls on Sunday, October 18th at 4pm for an amazing concert we’re calling Visions and Miracles. The central work on the program is a recent piece by Chris Theofanidis, a twice grammy-nominated composer that has also won the Rome Prize, a Fulbright, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Chris’s piece is called Visions and Miracles, and is inspired by the Medieval Spanish work Cantigas de Santa Maria, a collection of songs and poems from the 13th Century. Other pieces for the program include Felix Mendelssohn’s String Quartet No 2 Op 13, written when he was 18 and widely considered to be one of the composer’s first mature works, and Caroline Shaw’s Plan and Elevation. Shaw, the youngest composer to win the Pulitzer Prize, has a local connection with her piece: it was inspired by the architectural plans she studied during her time in-residence at Dumbarton Oaks. This concert is generously sponsored by Mary Ellen Bork.
The 9th Street Quartet is the Quartet-in-Residence for 9th Street Chamber Music – a chamber music performance and education program based in Northern Virginia. Since our formation in 2017, we have dedicated ourselves to making chamber music accessible to all, through performance series in intimate venues, and through our 9th Street Chamber Music String Quartet Intensive education program.
The 9th Street Quartet believes that the future of classical music lies in, well, the future! As culture takes a shift towards smaller, more personal, local connections (farm-to-table, local brewed, hand-crafted) we believe that classical music should be doing the same. Our programs are a blend of the old and the new: new masterpieces paired with old ones, traditional forms in intimate settings, experienced listeners with new concertgoers, and experienced musicians with students. We look forward to creating a tradition of commissioning new works from the amazing composers alive today, and building new partnerships with local organizations to help bring the communal chamber music experience to everyone.
