Friday, May 4, 2007

Umbilical Chords: Women Composers and the Creative Process

The Del Sol String Quartet premieres a retrospective of music composed by and about women from the past 111 years.

May 27 (Point Reyes Station)
May 30 (Berkeley)
May 31 (San Jose)
June 3 (San Francisco)

Click here for a PDF of the full press release.

Thursday, March 22, 2007

References in Feb. '07 Chamber Music

Del Sol is mentioned three times in the February 2007 issue (Vol. 24, No. 1) of Chamber Music magazine.

"A Midwestern Modernist" by James M. Keller, an article about Ruth Crawford Seeger
p. 67 talks about Crawford's String Quartet 1931, Andante movement as
“one I would recommend wholeheartedly is provided by the Del Sol String Quartet, a San Francisco foursome steeped in bravery and imagination.” He refers to Tear as “the group’s mind-expanding sampler CD.” He goes on to describe how Del Sol plays the movement faster than “any of the competition; ... [which] allows for a more fluid fluctuation among the constant waxing and waning of the four instruments...[T]he Del Sols’ result is grippingly otherworldly rather than just scrawny, and their ghostly timbre is abetted by an unusually vivid recorded acoustic. I hope we may look forward to their recording of this work in its entirety.”

p. 63, picture of Tear CD jacket
Click here for more info on Tear

"The Kronos Tradition" by Frank Otieri, p. 41
"In today's chamber music landscape — where quartets ranging from the Cassatt, Del Sol[emphasis added], Lark and Pacifica to genre-defying ensembles such as Ethel and Invert perform new music extensively and in some cases exclusively — it's difficult to remember the pre-Kronos idea of what a string quartet was or could be."

Monday, December 18, 2006

American Red Carpet for Foreign Composers

By Paul Hertelendy
artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music
Week of Dec. 11-18, 2006, Vol. 9, No. 41

Didgedo? Didn’t you do?
No, no, it's didjeridu, my favorite-name instrument, brought up to us from Down Under by one of the grand masters, composer Peter Sculthrope.
...

Stephen Kent played three didjeridus, with different pitches. He collaborated marvelously with the West Coast’s Del Sol String Quartet that has long championed modern music and done it stylishly, evocatively. [emphasis added]

...

Original article

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Press Release: Del Sol String Quartet's fall season

Announcing the Del Sol String Quartet's fall season:

"Premieres Without Borders"

(Nov. 5-10 in Point Reyes, Berkeley, Mountain View, and San Francisco)

Festival of New American Music "Four Seasons Concert" with the Melody of China
(November 11 at California State University, Sacramento)

"Concerts4Kids" (November 12 in Mountain View)

Click here to view the PDF of the press release.

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Five Alive

In the San Francisco Classical Voice ...

By Mark Alburger

This being the Halloween season, you could say there were two extra guest artists featured with the Del Sol String Quartet on Sunday at St. Kevin's Church in San Francisco. There was the renowned guest-in-residence Joan Jeanrenaud, who was also the founding cellist with the Kronos Quartet. But the works by the other "collaborators" — Franz Schubert (1797-1828) and Marc Blitzstein (1905-1964) — were played so well the composers seemed to have risen from the dead. And Hyo-shin Na's howling treat Song of the Beggars highlighted the innovative tricks of the other works on the program.

More

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Del Sol's Rich Thrift

In the San Francisco Classical Voice

By Janos Gereben

Money, to be sure, is important — especially if you don't have it — but it's no substitute for brains and guts in musical leadership. Big budgets do not equal high standards of programming excitement and excellence. As reported here last week, small, "regional," fiscally constrained California Symphony, on a budget of $1.65 million, is offering more American and commissioned works than mighty San Francisco Symphony, with its $56 million annual budget. The good folks in Davies Symphony Hall may be playing better than ever, and serving hundreds of thousands of "mainstream" listeners well, but a season of six American works from a major American orchestra? Tsk, tsk.

More

Tuesday, August 1, 2006

Review: Roumain's String Quartet #4 at Other Minds 11. Feb. 24-26, 2005

Roumain's String Quartet #4 at Other Minds 11.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco.
February 24-26, 2005.

"Alone in the first movement, the Del Sol String Quartet revealed itself to be an enthusiastically expressive ensemble, able to play in confident points of imitation across rhythms increasingly complicated both for the performers counting cues and listeners keeping track of the music's hurtling sense of melodic and rhythmic accumulation."

Musicworks #92 Summer 2005, page 48