Boston Conservatory Faculty String Quartet in Concert
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Boston Conservatory at Berklee string faculty members Sharan Leventhal and Katie Lansdale (violins), Paul Laraia (viola), and Andrew Mark (cello) will perform a recital of works by Caroline Shaw, Lei Liang, and Dimitri Shostakovich.
Program Information
Repertoire
LEI LIANG (b. 1972): Gobi Gloria (2006)
CAROLINE SHAW (b. 1982): Entr’acte (minuet and trio) (2011)
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906–1975): String Quartet No. 8 in C Minor, op. 110 (1960)
I. Largo
II. Allegro molto
III. Allegretto
IV. Largo
V. Largo
Sharan Leventhal, violin
Katie Lansdale, violin
Paul Laraia, viola
Andrew Mark, cello
CAROLINE SHAW (b. 1982): Entr’acte (minuet and trio) (2011)
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906–1975): String Quartet No. 8 in C Minor, op. 110 (1960)
I. Largo
II. Allegro molto
III. Allegretto
IV. Largo
V. Largo
Sharan Leventhal, violin
Katie Lansdale, violin
Paul Laraia, viola
Andrew Mark, cello
Program Notes
LEI LIANG (b. 1972): Gobi Gloria (2006)
Lei Liang is a Chinese-born American composer whose works have been described as “hauntingly beautiful and sonically colorful” by the New York Times, and as “far, far out of the ordinary, brilliantly original and inarguably gorgeous” by the Washington Post. Winner of the 2011 Rome Prize, Liang is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Aaron Copland Award, a Koussevitzky Music Foundation Commission, a Creative Capital Award, and the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His concerto Xiaoxiang (for saxophone and orchestra) was named a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Music. His orchestral work, A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams, won the prestigious 2021 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition.
Liang was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for the inaugural concert of the CONTACT! new music series. Other commissions and performances come from the Taipei Chinese Orchestra, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, the Heidelberger Philharmonisches Orchester, the Thailand Philharmonic, the Fromm Music Foundation, Meet the Composer, Chamber Music America, the National Endowment for the Arts, MAP Fund, Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the Manhattan Sinfonietta, Arditti Quartet, Shanghai Quartet, the Scharoun Ensemble of the Berlin Philharmonic, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, New York New Music Ensemble, Boston Musica Viva, pipa virtuoso Wu Man, and violinist Cho-Liang Lin, among others.
Liang studied composition with Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Robert Cogan, Chaya Czernowin, and Mario Davidovsky, and received degrees from the New England Conservatory of Music (BM and MM) and Harvard University (PhD). A Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, he held fellowships from the Harvard Society of Fellows and the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships. Liang taught in China as a distinguished visiting professor at Shaanxi Normal University College of Arts in Xi’an. He also served as honorary professor of composition and sound design at Wuhan Conservatory of Music and as visiting assistant professor of music at Middlebury College. He is Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego where he served as chair of the composition area and acting chair of the Music Department. Starting from 2018, Liang serves as the artistic director of the Chou Wen-chung Music Research Center in China. Liang's catalogue of more than a hundred compositions is published exclusively by Schott Music Corporation (New York).
Commissioned by the Ying Quartet and premiered in 2006, Liang’s Gobi Gloria for String Quartet was inspired by the composer’s childhood introduction to Mongolian folk music through a family friend, a leading scholar of Mongolian traditional music. It was through this connection that Liang first encountered the Mongolian urtiin duu, or “long song,” a genre that UNESCO designated in 2005 as one of the Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. This song style is at least 2,400 years old and singing the verses can last up to three hours. They contain the collective memory of a people whose history includes the Mongol Empire, the largest empire in history to stretch uninterrupted across land, and a deep connection to nature through their nomadic lifestyle—one which 30 percent of the population still practices.
Hearing the melancholic sound of a lone voice through which centuries spoke, Liang was struck by the sound of this music so rooted in nostalgia. He has described the stark contrast between the upbeat “fabricated happy” music he heard on the radio in Beijing, stridently urging citizens to feel pride in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the “very lonely songs” about missing home, friends, and family.
In his program note for the piece, Liang writes:
““Gobi Gloria’ belongs to a series of compositions that grew out of my admiration for Mongolian music. The series includes ‘Feng’ (for cello solo, written for Feng Hew), ‘Gobi Polyphony’ (for erhu and cello, written for Xu Ke), ‘Gobi Canticle’ (for violin and cello, written for Masuko Ushioda and Laurence Lesser), and ‘Serashi Fragments’ (written for the Arditti Quartet).
“A principal melody is played against its own inversion, retrograde, and retrograde-inversion in an otherwise mostly heterophonic texture. The piece alludes to various genres of Mongolian music that include the long-chant as well as the music of dance and shaman rituals. It concludes with a rendering of a folk song that I heard during my visit to Nei Monggol region in 1996.”
CAROLINE SHAW (b. 1982): Entr’acte (minuet and trio) (2011)
Caroline Shaw is a musician who moves among roles, genres, and mediums, trying to imagine a world of sound that has never been heard before but has always existed. She works often in collaboration with others, as producer, composer, violinist, and vocalist. Shaw is the recipient of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music, several Grammy awards, an honorary doctorate from Yale, and a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship.
Recent projects include the score to Fleishman Is in Trouble (FX/Hulu), vocal work with Rosalía (MOTOMAMI), the score to Josephine Decker’s The Sky Is Everywhere (A24/Apple), music for the National Theatre’s production of The Crucible (directed by Lyndsey Turner), Justin Peck’s Partita with New York City Ballet, a new stage work LIFE (Gandini Juggling/Merce Cunningham Trust), the premiere of Microfictions Vol. 3 for New York Philharmonic and Roomful of Teeth, a live orchestral score for Wu Tsang’s silent film Moby Dick (co-composed with Andrew Yee), two albums on Nonesuch (Evergreen and The Blue Hour), the score for Helen Simoneau’s dance work Delicate Power, tours of Graveyards & Gardens (co-created immersive theatrical work with Vanessa Goodman), and tours with So Percussion featuring songs from Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part (Nonesuch), amid occasional chamber music appearances as violist (Chamber Music Society of Minnesota, La Jolla Music Society).
Shaw has written over 100 works in the last decade, for Anne Sofie von Otter, Davóne Tines, Yo-Yo Ma, Renée Fleming, Dawn Upshaw, LA Phil, Philharmonia Baroque, Seattle Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, Aizuri Quartet, the Crossing, Dover Quartet, Calidore Quartet, Brooklyn Rider, Miro Quartet, I Giardini, Ars Nova Copenhagen, Ariadne Greif, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Britt Festival, and the Vail Dance Festival. She has contributed production to albums by Rosalía, Woodkid, and Nas. Her work as vocalist or composer has appeared in several films, tv series, and podcasts including The Humans, Bombshell, Yellowjackets, Maid, Dark, Beyoncé’s Homecoming, Tár, Dolly Parton’s America, and More Perfect. Her favorite color is yellow, and her favorite smell is rosemary.
“Entr’acte” was first performed by the Brentano Quartet at Princeton University in April 2011. The ensemble A Far Cry commissioned a version for string ensemble in 2014, and it has become one of Shaw’s most performed pieces. Shaw states that “‘Entr’acte’ was written in 2011 after hearing the Brentano Quartet play Haydn’s op. 77, No. 2—with their spare and soulful shift to the D-flat major trio in the minuet. It is structured like a minuet and trio, riffing on that classical form but taking it a little further. I love the way some music (like the minuets of op. 77) suddenly takes you to the other side of Alice’s looking glass, in a kind of absurd, subtle, technicolor transition.”
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906–1975): String Quartet No. 8 in C Minor, op. 110 (1960)
The great Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich created music that vividly reflected the harrowing circumstances of his life in the Soviet Union. Shostakovich met with success early, with the 1926 premiere of his first symphony. Thereafter, however, he was tormented by a life of political and cultural repression, foreign invasion, and personal tragedy. Throughout his professional life, Shostakovich suffered from professional and personal whiplash, with governmental accolades alternating with denunciations and threats. His music mirrors many aspects of this life journey, from its stark nobility to its violent outrage, from its sardonic, even grotesque wit to its sense of deep tragedy and desolation.
Of Shostakovich’s 15 string quartets, Quartet No. 8 is the best known. Shostakovich wrote it in 1960, just after he reluctantly became a member of the Communist Party. He dedicated it “to the victims of fascism and the war,” writing it in three days. According to his friend Lev Lebedinsky, Shostakovich thought of the work as his epitaph and confessed that he planned to commit suicide around this time. It is a deeply personal musical statement. When Shostakovich heard the Borodin Quartet play it for the first time, he wept.
The quartet comprises five interconnected movements. The pitches that open the first movement –DSCH, or a translation of his initials that he used in many of his works—wind their way in and out of all the movements of the quartet. The piece also quotes a number of his other works, forming a sweeping panorama of his life as a composer.
—Katie LansdaleSharan Leventhal, violin, joined Boston Conservatory at Berklee in 2005 and teaches applied violin, chamber music, and contemporary performance practice. She has toured four continents as a soloist, chamber musician, and teacher. Since winning the Kranischsteiner Musikpreis at the 1984 International Contemporary Music Festival in Darmstadt, Germany, she has built a reputation as a champion of contemporary music, premiering over 130 pieces and receiving more than 30 grants to commission and record new works around the globe.
Katie Lansdale, violin, has performed as a soloist and chamber artist throughout North America, South America, and Europe and as part of numerous concert series, including those of the Phillips Collection, the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, and Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater. She has made concerto appearances with the National Symphony, Austin Mozart Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony, Schroeder Classical Orchestra, Cleveland Chamber Symphony, New York Spectrum Orchestra, and the New York Repertory Orchestra.
Paul Laraia, viola, joined the Conservatory in 2023 as an associate professor of viola. Acclaimed by The Strad for his “eloquent” and “vibrant” playing, Laraia is an active soloist, chamber musician, and new music proponent. In competition, he was awarded first prize in the 13th Lionel Tertis International Viola Competition, first prize in the 14th National Sphinx Competition, and a gold medal with high distinction at the fifth Manhattan International Music Competition.
Andrew Mark, cello, is a professor of cello and chamber music at Boston Conservatory. From 1988 to 1991, Mark served as a US Artistic Ambassador, giving recitals and master classes throughout Europe, Asia, Central America, and South America. He was the cellist of the Boston Composers String Quartet (1987–1994) and winner of the silver medal at the Osaka International Chamber Music Competition. Mark also played cello for the CORE Ensemble (1993–2000), an award-winning trio of cello, piano, and percussion, dedicated to the creation and performance of new music. He has premiered more than 100 new chamber works and collaborated with composers such as Donald Martino, Bernard Rands, Leon Kirchner, Augusta Reed Thomas, and Witold Lutoslawski.
Lei Liang is a Chinese-born American composer whose works have been described as “hauntingly beautiful and sonically colorful” by the New York Times, and as “far, far out of the ordinary, brilliantly original and inarguably gorgeous” by the Washington Post. Winner of the 2011 Rome Prize, Liang is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Aaron Copland Award, a Koussevitzky Music Foundation Commission, a Creative Capital Award, and the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His concerto Xiaoxiang (for saxophone and orchestra) was named a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Music. His orchestral work, A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams, won the prestigious 2021 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition.
Liang was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for the inaugural concert of the CONTACT! new music series. Other commissions and performances come from the Taipei Chinese Orchestra, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, the Heidelberger Philharmonisches Orchester, the Thailand Philharmonic, the Fromm Music Foundation, Meet the Composer, Chamber Music America, the National Endowment for the Arts, MAP Fund, Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the Manhattan Sinfonietta, Arditti Quartet, Shanghai Quartet, the Scharoun Ensemble of the Berlin Philharmonic, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, New York New Music Ensemble, Boston Musica Viva, pipa virtuoso Wu Man, and violinist Cho-Liang Lin, among others.
Liang studied composition with Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Robert Cogan, Chaya Czernowin, and Mario Davidovsky, and received degrees from the New England Conservatory of Music (BM and MM) and Harvard University (PhD). A Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, he held fellowships from the Harvard Society of Fellows and the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships. Liang taught in China as a distinguished visiting professor at Shaanxi Normal University College of Arts in Xi’an. He also served as honorary professor of composition and sound design at Wuhan Conservatory of Music and as visiting assistant professor of music at Middlebury College. He is Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego where he served as chair of the composition area and acting chair of the Music Department. Starting from 2018, Liang serves as the artistic director of the Chou Wen-chung Music Research Center in China. Liang's catalogue of more than a hundred compositions is published exclusively by Schott Music Corporation (New York).
Commissioned by the Ying Quartet and premiered in 2006, Liang’s Gobi Gloria for String Quartet was inspired by the composer’s childhood introduction to Mongolian folk music through a family friend, a leading scholar of Mongolian traditional music. It was through this connection that Liang first encountered the Mongolian urtiin duu, or “long song,” a genre that UNESCO designated in 2005 as one of the Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. This song style is at least 2,400 years old and singing the verses can last up to three hours. They contain the collective memory of a people whose history includes the Mongol Empire, the largest empire in history to stretch uninterrupted across land, and a deep connection to nature through their nomadic lifestyle—one which 30 percent of the population still practices.
Hearing the melancholic sound of a lone voice through which centuries spoke, Liang was struck by the sound of this music so rooted in nostalgia. He has described the stark contrast between the upbeat “fabricated happy” music he heard on the radio in Beijing, stridently urging citizens to feel pride in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the “very lonely songs” about missing home, friends, and family.
In his program note for the piece, Liang writes:
““Gobi Gloria’ belongs to a series of compositions that grew out of my admiration for Mongolian music. The series includes ‘Feng’ (for cello solo, written for Feng Hew), ‘Gobi Polyphony’ (for erhu and cello, written for Xu Ke), ‘Gobi Canticle’ (for violin and cello, written for Masuko Ushioda and Laurence Lesser), and ‘Serashi Fragments’ (written for the Arditti Quartet).
“A principal melody is played against its own inversion, retrograde, and retrograde-inversion in an otherwise mostly heterophonic texture. The piece alludes to various genres of Mongolian music that include the long-chant as well as the music of dance and shaman rituals. It concludes with a rendering of a folk song that I heard during my visit to Nei Monggol region in 1996.”
CAROLINE SHAW (b. 1982): Entr’acte (minuet and trio) (2011)
Caroline Shaw is a musician who moves among roles, genres, and mediums, trying to imagine a world of sound that has never been heard before but has always existed. She works often in collaboration with others, as producer, composer, violinist, and vocalist. Shaw is the recipient of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music, several Grammy awards, an honorary doctorate from Yale, and a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship.
Recent projects include the score to Fleishman Is in Trouble (FX/Hulu), vocal work with Rosalía (MOTOMAMI), the score to Josephine Decker’s The Sky Is Everywhere (A24/Apple), music for the National Theatre’s production of The Crucible (directed by Lyndsey Turner), Justin Peck’s Partita with New York City Ballet, a new stage work LIFE (Gandini Juggling/Merce Cunningham Trust), the premiere of Microfictions Vol. 3 for New York Philharmonic and Roomful of Teeth, a live orchestral score for Wu Tsang’s silent film Moby Dick (co-composed with Andrew Yee), two albums on Nonesuch (Evergreen and The Blue Hour), the score for Helen Simoneau’s dance work Delicate Power, tours of Graveyards & Gardens (co-created immersive theatrical work with Vanessa Goodman), and tours with So Percussion featuring songs from Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part (Nonesuch), amid occasional chamber music appearances as violist (Chamber Music Society of Minnesota, La Jolla Music Society).
Shaw has written over 100 works in the last decade, for Anne Sofie von Otter, Davóne Tines, Yo-Yo Ma, Renée Fleming, Dawn Upshaw, LA Phil, Philharmonia Baroque, Seattle Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, Aizuri Quartet, the Crossing, Dover Quartet, Calidore Quartet, Brooklyn Rider, Miro Quartet, I Giardini, Ars Nova Copenhagen, Ariadne Greif, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Britt Festival, and the Vail Dance Festival. She has contributed production to albums by Rosalía, Woodkid, and Nas. Her work as vocalist or composer has appeared in several films, tv series, and podcasts including The Humans, Bombshell, Yellowjackets, Maid, Dark, Beyoncé’s Homecoming, Tár, Dolly Parton’s America, and More Perfect. Her favorite color is yellow, and her favorite smell is rosemary.
“Entr’acte” was first performed by the Brentano Quartet at Princeton University in April 2011. The ensemble A Far Cry commissioned a version for string ensemble in 2014, and it has become one of Shaw’s most performed pieces. Shaw states that “‘Entr’acte’ was written in 2011 after hearing the Brentano Quartet play Haydn’s op. 77, No. 2—with their spare and soulful shift to the D-flat major trio in the minuet. It is structured like a minuet and trio, riffing on that classical form but taking it a little further. I love the way some music (like the minuets of op. 77) suddenly takes you to the other side of Alice’s looking glass, in a kind of absurd, subtle, technicolor transition.”
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906–1975): String Quartet No. 8 in C Minor, op. 110 (1960)
The great Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich created music that vividly reflected the harrowing circumstances of his life in the Soviet Union. Shostakovich met with success early, with the 1926 premiere of his first symphony. Thereafter, however, he was tormented by a life of political and cultural repression, foreign invasion, and personal tragedy. Throughout his professional life, Shostakovich suffered from professional and personal whiplash, with governmental accolades alternating with denunciations and threats. His music mirrors many aspects of this life journey, from its stark nobility to its violent outrage, from its sardonic, even grotesque wit to its sense of deep tragedy and desolation.
Of Shostakovich’s 15 string quartets, Quartet No. 8 is the best known. Shostakovich wrote it in 1960, just after he reluctantly became a member of the Communist Party. He dedicated it “to the victims of fascism and the war,” writing it in three days. According to his friend Lev Lebedinsky, Shostakovich thought of the work as his epitaph and confessed that he planned to commit suicide around this time. It is a deeply personal musical statement. When Shostakovich heard the Borodin Quartet play it for the first time, he wept.
The quartet comprises five interconnected movements. The pitches that open the first movement –DSCH, or a translation of his initials that he used in many of his works—wind their way in and out of all the movements of the quartet. The piece also quotes a number of his other works, forming a sweeping panorama of his life as a composer.
—Katie LansdaleSharan Leventhal, violin, joined Boston Conservatory at Berklee in 2005 and teaches applied violin, chamber music, and contemporary performance practice. She has toured four continents as a soloist, chamber musician, and teacher. Since winning the Kranischsteiner Musikpreis at the 1984 International Contemporary Music Festival in Darmstadt, Germany, she has built a reputation as a champion of contemporary music, premiering over 130 pieces and receiving more than 30 grants to commission and record new works around the globe.
Katie Lansdale, violin, has performed as a soloist and chamber artist throughout North America, South America, and Europe and as part of numerous concert series, including those of the Phillips Collection, the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, and Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater. She has made concerto appearances with the National Symphony, Austin Mozart Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony, Schroeder Classical Orchestra, Cleveland Chamber Symphony, New York Spectrum Orchestra, and the New York Repertory Orchestra.
Paul Laraia, viola, joined the Conservatory in 2023 as an associate professor of viola. Acclaimed by The Strad for his “eloquent” and “vibrant” playing, Laraia is an active soloist, chamber musician, and new music proponent. In competition, he was awarded first prize in the 13th Lionel Tertis International Viola Competition, first prize in the 14th National Sphinx Competition, and a gold medal with high distinction at the fifth Manhattan International Music Competition.
Andrew Mark, cello, is a professor of cello and chamber music at Boston Conservatory. From 1988 to 1991, Mark served as a US Artistic Ambassador, giving recitals and master classes throughout Europe, Asia, Central America, and South America. He was the cellist of the Boston Composers String Quartet (1987–1994) and winner of the silver medal at the Osaka International Chamber Music Competition. Mark also played cello for the CORE Ensemble (1993–2000), an award-winning trio of cello, piano, and percussion, dedicated to the creation and performance of new music. He has premiered more than 100 new chamber works and collaborated with composers such as Donald Martino, Bernard Rands, Leon Kirchner, Augusta Reed Thomas, and Witold Lutoslawski.
Ensemble
VIOLIN
Sharan Leventhal
Katie Lansdale
VIOLA
Paul Laraia
CELLO
Andrew Mark
Sharan Leventhal
Katie Lansdale
VIOLA
Paul Laraia
CELLO
Andrew Mark
Concert Services Staff
Assistant Director, Concert Services – Luis Herrera
Coordinator, Concert Services – Matthew Carey
Concert Production Manager – Kendall Floyd
Performance Technology Technicians – Sara Pagiaro, Goran Daskalov
Coordinator, Concert Services – Matthew Carey
Concert Production Manager – Kendall Floyd
Performance Technology Technicians – Sara Pagiaro, Goran Daskalov
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