Kaija Saariaho is 2015 composer in residence at Vermont’s Marlboro Festival, where on July 25 musicians performed her 1987 work Nymphea for string quartet and electronics. The work, subtitled “Jardin secret III,” referencing Saariaho’s computer software developed at Paris’s IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) in the 1980s, received more than 40 hours of rehearsal prior to the Marlboro performance by violinists Tessa Lark and Lucy Chapman, violist John Stulz, cellist Sarah Rommel, and Jean Baptiste Barriere, on electronics. Other highlights this summer at Marlboro include the woodwind quintet And Then there were, a 2014 composition by clarinetist/composer Charles Neidich; Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 4, Op. 37; and the Mozart Piano Quartet in G Minor, K. 478 with Mitsuko Uchida, Marlboro’s artistic director, violinist Elizabeth Fayette, violist Rebecca Albers, and cellist Marie-Elisabeth Hecker. The Marlboro Festival continues through August 16.
Posted July 29, 2015
