Telegraph Quartet Partners with its Students

This month’s installment of Chamber Music Tuesday in the Barbro Osher Recital Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) was curated by its Ensemble-in-Residence, the Telegraph Quartet of violinists Eric Chin and Joseph Maile, violist Pei-Ling Lin, and cellist Jeremiah Shaw. The highlight of the evening came in the second half of the program, when the quartet players paired with the four student winners of the Telegraph Players Chamber Competition: violinists Archie Brown and Po-Yu Lee, violist Zoe Yost, and cellist Calvin Kung. These students assembled with their teachers to perform Felix Mendelssohn’s Opus 20 octet in E-flat major.

The results could not have been more refreshing. Indeed, this is music that thrives on a recital setting in favor over any recording efforts. During a performance the eye can guide the ear through Mendelssohn’s textures, which, more often than not, are more than a pair of ears can negotiate. To some extent the camera work for last night’s video stream also contributed to the listening experience. Nevertheless, most of the shots took in the whole ensemble, providing a clear view of what each of the eight performers was doing.

Violinists Eric Chin, Joseph Maile, Po-Yu Lee, and Archie Brown, violists Zoe Yost and Pei-Ling Lin, and cellists Calvin Kung and Jeremiah Shaw (screen shot from last night’s streamed performance)

Mendelssohn was complemented at the beginning of the program with Joseph Haydn’s Hoboken III/48, the fifth of the six Opus 50 string quartets known as the “Prussian” quartets. The quartet was composed in F major; and its second (Poco Adagio) movement was given the title “Le rêve” (the dream). Maile took the lead for this performance, whose high spirits set the tone for the entire evening.

He then remained in the leader’s chair for the second offering before the intermission. This was Gabriela Lena Frank’s string quartet version of her suite Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout. I have had the good fortune to write about this music several times. The Del Sol String Quartet recorded it for their Zia album, which was released by Sono Luminus in February of 2013. The Amaranth Quartet performed it in 2016 as part of its Music of Cultural Coexistence concert series. Most recently, in 2020 Bright Shiny Things released Her Own Wings, an album of Frank’s two string quartets taken from performances at the Willamette Valley Chamber Music Festival in Oregon.

Unfortunately, the event page for this program on the SFCM Web site only provided the Spanish titles of the six movements of Leyendas. I have no idea whether the program book was more informative. In the past I was able to consult Frank’s own Web page for information about those movements, and I was glad to see that her Web page is still available. However, even without such assistance, it was easy to appreciate the rich assortment of sonorities that Frank could evoke from “classical” quartet players. Leyendas offered a significant departure from the rhetorics of Haydn and Mendelssohn, and I was delighted that Telegraph presented her music with such stimulating commitment.