CYPRESS STRING QUARTET: ELENA RUEHR QUARTET BASED ON THE NOVEL "BEL CANTO" BY ANN PATCHETT

Bel Canto                                                                            Elena Ruehr

I.       Rebels in the vents                                                      (b. 1963)
II.       Three generals
III.      Esmeralda and Joachim
IV.     The accompanist dies
V.      Simon Thibault makes coq au vin
VI.     Gen translates for Roxane
VII.    Carmen studies grammar
VIII.    Gen arranges a meeting
IX.     Cesar sings
X.      In the garden

 commissioned by and lovingly dedicated to the Cypress String Quartet

About Elena Ruehr:

Elena Ruehr (b. 1963) grew up in Michigan’s isolated and beautiful Upper Peninsula. Her musical training began at home, where she learned folk songs from her mother, who sang and played guitar. Her father, a mathematician, played jazz piano and listened to the Beethoven and Bartok string quartets while solving equations. Her older brothers brought home recordings of Morton Sobotnik and Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin and Paul Simon. Ruehr started playing the piano and composing at age four. With her mother as teacher, she quickly learned to read music and to improvise. She also studied ballet and modern dance for nine years, and later learned various forms of folk dance. As a teenager, Ruehr worked as a church organist, rock-band keyboardist/singer and musical director of the local university’s theater troupe. Her town of 4,000 was also home to Finnish kantele player and classically trained composer Melvin Kangas, who became Ruehr’s mentor during high school and passed on to her his dedication to beauty, individualism, and the avant-garde. Later, Ruehr studied with William Bolcom at the University of Michigan and Vincent Persichetti at Juilliard. In addition to her studies of the classical European repertoire, she played in the University of Michigan Gamelan and studied West African drumming, an interest she followed for many years. This cornucopia of interests, combined with her saturation in and complete understanding of traditional western classical forms, flows throughout Ruehr’s music.

In the mid ’90s Ruehr began a collaboration with international award winning baritone Stephen Salters and became deeply interested in vocal music, writing an opera, two cantatas, and many songs. During the same period, she met the Cypress String Quartet, whose Call & Response programming – the commissioning of a new piece inspired by two related quartets from the standard repertoire – influenced her work greatly. Dr. Ruehr has been a Fellow at Harvard’s  Radcliffe Institute and is currently a faculty member at MIT.

The Cypress String Quartet returns to Montalvo for its popular Salon Series. As part of the overall Villa Chamber Music Series, the Cypress present one of the most unique concert formats. Rather than a traditional classical chamber music concert of three works with an intermission, the Cypress features one work that the group discusses in depth and performs.  The quartet contextualizes the featured piece through musical examples, discussion and performances of additional single movements or short works.  They then follow this explanation with a performance of the featured piece in its entirety.  During the performance, the audience has the opportunity to develop an intimate relationship with the featured music as well as with the performers through their explanations.  Past audience members have commented that it’s a unique concert experience that demystifies classical music and offers insight into the creative process.