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COATES, G: Piano Quintet / Symphony No. 10 (Kreutzer Quartet, Chadwick, CalArts Orchestra, S. Allen)
Gloria Coates’s personal sound-world is unlike any other in contemporary music. Her Piano Quintet is rooted in the poetry of fellow American pioneer Emily Dickinson, with half of the quartet tuned a quarter-tone higher than the other, the strange beauty of the music emerging in glacial landscapes and shimmering microtones. Coates’s Symphony No. 10 evokes the archaeological ruins of a Celtic tribe, inspiring a torrent of dramatic percussion and long held tones that curve and shake in a moving body of sound.
Peter Sheppard Skærved, violin I
Mihailo Trandafilovski, violin II
Morgan Goff, viola
Neil Heyde, cello
The Kreutzer Quartet has been critically acclaimed for its performances and recordings of works from our time and from the great quartet literature. This has resulted in cyclic performances and recordings of works ranging from Anton Reicha and Beethoven to Michael Tippett and Roberto Gerhard. They are the dedicatees of hundreds of new works. Composers who have written for them include Gloria Coates, Hans Werner Henze, Michael Finnissy, Hafliði Hallgrímsson, Poul Ruders, Edward Cowie, Jörg Widmann and George Rochberg. During the latter part of 2018 they will present new works by composers including Robert Saxton, Laurie Bamon, Elliott Schwartz, Peter Dickinson, Roger Redgate, Robin Holloway, Jeremy Dale Roberts, Gary Carpenter, David Matthews, Paul Pellay and Rosalind Page, to name just a few. The Quartet are Ensemble in Residence at Goldsmiths College, London. The Quartet has a truly international career, playing at venues ranging from the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, to Wilton’s Music Hall, their London ‘home’, and appearing regularly at festivals including the Bergen International Festival and the Venice Biennale.
Photo courtesy of Leif Johannsen
A native of Wisconsin, Gloria Coates studied with Alexander Tcherepnin, and with Otto Luening and Jack Beeson at Columbia. Since 1969 she lived principally in Europe, where she continued to champion American music. Her work includes 11 symphonies, varied chamber music, and solo, vocal and electronic compositions.
Chamber Music
Gloria Coates wrote a number of string quartets, often finding a place for her favourite device of glissando, a marked feature of an early student attempt at the genre, to which she later returned. Her love of indistinct textures is combined with canons, palindromes and simple structures, all providing an element of symmetry.
Orchestral Music
Gloria Coates was remarkably prolific in her composition of symphonies since her first in 1973, with its explanatory title Music on Open Strings. Symphony No. 14 draws on earlier American sources and makes use of quarter-tones, while Symphony No. 15 has the subtitle ‘Homage to Mozart’.
