The Calidore String Quartet is featured on the fifth disc of Creative Capitals LIVE, a collection of live recordings highlighting performances from the 2018 Music@Menlo summer festival season. This year’s compilation celebrates urban locales that have inspired some of Western classical music’s greatest composers. The quartet is joined by flutist Stephanie McNab for the selections from the monumental Musical Offering, produced after an aging J. S. Bach traveled to Berlin in 1747 to answer the contrapuntal challenge issued by King Frederick the Great. Mozart subsequently appeared at the same court, this time before King Friedrich Wilhelm II, to honor the new King of Prussia with his set of Prussian Quartets.
The disc concludes with the Fifth String Quartet of Béla Bartók, who almost singlehandedly established a nationalist Hungarian compositional language through years of devoted and immersive study of his nation’s folk traditions. The San Francisco Chronicle praised the Calidore String Quartet’s “pointedly fierce account” of the Bartók following the summer 2018 performance while Repeat Performances described how the Calidore “brought a sophisticated audience to their feet with their flawless performance and emotional immediacy.” San Francisco Classical Voice described the complexity of the work and wrote, “Even though I’ve heard this group before, such transparency and utter clarity in performance hardly seemed credible to the ear.”
The 2018 edition of Music@Menlo LIVE is available in downloadable digital format as well as on disc. Downloading and streaming are available through online digital music retailers and streaming services including Amazon, iTunes and Soptify.
