Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Grammy nominated Spektral Quartet to perform at Snowy Owl Theater

Wenatchee native Russell Rolen plays cello for the groundbreaking group

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The groundbreaking Spektral Quartet is coming to Leavenworth. The recently Grammy nominated group, which is based in Chicago, includes cellist Russell Rolen, who grew up in Cashmere and Wenatchee. 

His mother is noted local piano teacher Joan Johnson. 

“I started from a very young age, four years old, playing the piano. I studied with my mother and other teachers,” Rolen said. “I started playing the cello when I was eight years old. I was playing orchestras growing up. I played with the Wenatchee Valley Symphony starting in eighth grade. I was in orchestra, choir at the high school.”

He went on to study music in college, at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore. After graduating, he moved to Chicago, where he did some graduate work at Northwestern. The quartet began, unassumingly, in 2009. 

“After I finished my graduate work, I had some friends here in town whose company I enjoy,” Rolen said. “We wanted to get together and play. We would bring a stack of music and a case of beer, just go through it. For the better part of a year, it was just beer and Beethoven, I suppose. We were just having a good time.”

People knew they were getting together, so the quartet played a concert here and there. It sort of grew gradually and organically from there, he said. Some quartets start in school, but there’s was different, since they were all out of school. 

Things were formalized with the quartet in 2011, along the same time they gained a residency at the University of Chicago. Rolen said they started having their own concert series in Chicago. 

“We produced our own concert series and we tour quite a bit around the country. We’ve done some international traveling. Back in December, we were nominated for a grammy award,” Rolen said. “We didn’t win, but we got to go to the Grammys, which was quite an experience and really fun. We were kind of the nerds at the party because we were the classical people. It was really rewarding to be recognized like that.”

The success, he said, is because they are trying relate to their audience in ways that hopefully feel authentic, contemporary and relatable. They play all different kinds of music. Of course, the golden oldies, like from Beethoven, but also contemporary music. 

He said that has served them well. 

“We’ve had lots of amazing artistic connections with very creative people, composers especially and artists of different disciplines when we work together on larger projects. It might be other musicians,” Rolen said. “We’ve worked with visual artists, actors and directors, poets, all different kinds of artists. It’s really about opening up what a string quartet can be.”

A string quartet is a genre going back hundreds of years. It is revered as a vehicle for composers most sublime, most personal music expressions, he said. It has been known that way, as a medium of really intimate music making for many years. 

“Our goal and mission is to bring that tradition into the 21st century and see where it goes and what it can be, not restricted only to old music but also find out it can be really relevant in people’s lives as they take in works of art,” Rolen said. “We’ve done things in the past that have really caught people’s attention.”

Two years ago, the Spektral Quartet commissioned over 40 composers to write miniatures, works of music between 1 and 30 seconds long. The prompt to the composers was, what do you want to hear coming from your phone?

“We had these great composers, some of the finest musical minds in the business, people who have won the Pulitzer Prize, Guggenheim or MacArthur fellows, amazing musical thinkers, writing us ring tones basically,” Rolen said. “It was a great project. It really brings the string quartet into everyday life. It makes it something that a general audience can appreciate. Hopefully, it is a window into many different kinds of music. Really ingenious treatment within the quartet in that short format.”

The hope is, he said, if you hear one of these short pieces, you’ll wonder what was that and where can I hear more of that? Those are the types of projects they like to do, he said, although most projects are not like that. 

The concert in Leavenworth will be a bit more of a traditional format, with some great works of music in a concert format. The mission is to bring the string quartet into modern life. 

“The music we’re playing will run the gamut. We’re playing a gorgeous piece by Revell. One of the movements you might recognize by different movie scores. We have two new pieces that were written for us in the last year,” Rolen said. “One by Augusta Read Thomas. She lives here in Chicago and is famous all over the world. She wrote a piece for us in the last six months that we premiered in April. We’ll also play a really wild piece by Sam Pluta. Sam is a colleague of our who just moved here from New York.”

Pluta is a computer music specialist, working with music on his laptop. He wrote a piece for the quartet, where the quartet mimics the kind of sounds Pluta makes from his electronic equipment. Rolen said it was “wild sounding.”

Certainly, it is an exciting time for quartet. Rolen is glad to be coming back to the state. 

“We’re coming to Washington state to participate in the Walla Walla Chamber Music Festival, which is the week following our appearance in Leavenworth. I was really delighted we were able to work this performance out in Leavenworth so that old friends and family can come see what we’re up to,” Rolen said. 

The Spektral Quartet is coming to the Snowy Owl Theater on Sunday, June 18. Go to www.icicle.org for more information. 

Ian Dunn can be reached at 548-5286 or editor@leavenworthecho.com.

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