The Ciompi Quartet

Featuring Susan Fancher, saxophone

Program

Arvo Pärt: Fratres
Elliott Carter: Two Fragments for String Quartet
Scott Lindroth: New Work for Saxophone and String Quartet—World Premiere
Dvořák: “American” Quartet in F Major, Op. 96.

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The Ciompi Quartet opens this concert with Arvo Pärt’s landmark Fratres, an engrossing 1977 piece that seesaws between hyperactive flurries and halcyon stretches. They continue with Elliott Carter’s Two Fragments for String Quartet, two short sections that test divides between silence and volume, stillness and motion. The world premiere of a new piece by Duke Vice Provost for the Arts, Scott Lindroth, follows; written for the Ciompi and acclaimed concert saxophonist Susan Fancher, Lindroth’s single-movement work allows “the quartet to follow Fancher’s lyrical, spirited, fragile, and sometimes withdrawn utterances with effortless grace.” The Quartet closes with Dvo¿ák’s String Quartet in C Major, op. 61, a delightful end to the Ciompi’s new beginning.After more than forty years with the Ciompi Quartet, Duke University’s esteemed string quartet-in-residence, cellist Fred Raimi retired in April 2018. Just days before Raimi’s final performance, the Ciompi announced that the search to fill the seat of its longest-standing member was finally complete with the addition of cellist Caroline Stinson. After extended stints in two of New York’s most celebrated quartets, the Lark and the Cassatt, Stinson brings new energy to the Ciompi as it begins to stake out an identity without Raimi for the first time since 1974. The new quartet’s first season honors tradition while pursuing an ambitious set of commissions, collaborations, and new works.