With a thrilling and diverse array of pieces, Grammy Award-winning Harlem Quartet is returning to Chautauqua with some new favorites in tow.
The Harlem Quartet — with violinists Ilmar Gavilán and Melissa White, violist Jaime Amador, and cellist Felix Umansky — is performing at 4 p.m. this evening in Elizabeth S. Lenna Hall, the latest recital in this year’s Chautauqua Chamber Music Guest Artist Series.
Pieces to be played include William Grant Still’s Lyric Quartette; Dizzy Gillespie’s A Night in Tunisia, arranged by Dave Glenn; two tracks from Wynton Marsalis’ At the Octoroon Balls; Guido López-Gavilán’s “Cuarteto En Guaguanco”; Caroline Shaw’s Entr’acte; and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s Quartet in E-flat Major.
Still’s Lyric Quartette, subtitled “Musical Portraits of Three Friends,” was composed in 1960 and consists of three movements. Still was known for being one of the biggest African-American composers of the 20th century, and for the barriers he broke: he was the first American composer to have an opera produced by the New York City Opera, the first African-American composer to conduct a major American orchestra, and the first to have an opera performed on national television, among other accomplishments.
Gillespie’s A Night in Tunisia — originally called interlude — is a jazz standard with bebop and Afro-Cuban tones that was originally recorded by Sarah Vaughan in 1944. Composed in 1995, Marsalis’ At the Octoroon Balls is reflective of the composer’s vibrant birthplace of New Orleans.
Shaw became the youngest recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music at the age of 30, and Hensel was considered a prodigy like her brother Felix Mendelssohn, but because of the culture in 1834, was severely limited as a woman; her musicality is centered around humanism and emotionality.
Violinist Gavilán grew up in a prominent musical family; he and his brother pianist Aldo López-Gavilán are the sons of composer Guido López-Gavilán — the two brothers have performed at Chautauqua before, even bringing “Cuarteto En Guaguanco” to the Amphitheater stage with the Music School Festival Orchestra in 2022. Guaguanco is the name of a dance brought by enslaved Africans to Cuba and “Cuarteto en Guaguanco” combines both classical and Afro-Cuban elements.
Gavilán remembers his father returning from Czechoslovakia with a toy for the 6-year-old; Gavilán was hoping for a toy truck, or car — instead, he got a toy violin. It felt like a trick, Gavilán said, because “before you knew it, I had a Russian teacher screaming at me in private lessons. I’m like, what kind of toy is this?” But, he quickly became a child prodigy, and Gavilán started tasting what popularity could do for a “misbehaving kid.”
The love for the craft came when he debuted at 12 years old in Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto with the Havana Symphony Orchestra (National Symphony Orchestra of Cuba) and his father, Guido, conducted.
Since the Harlem Quartet’s debut in Carnegie Hall in 2006, they have played in 47 states and internationally. The Quartet was founded by the Sphinx Foundation — each musician are all first prize laureates of the Sphinx Competition. The foundation’s mission is to address the underrepresentation of people of color in classical music and transform lives through the power of diversity in the arts.
“Diversity makes everything better,” said White, who “didn’t see a lot of people like myself” at the beginning of her career as a classical violinist. “We learn from differences; I think we expand and can be more creative through each other’s differences. Musically speaking, every single genre is enhanced by different cultures and different influences.”
The number of people of color in the audience of Harlem Quartet performances, Gavilán said, tends to be low. So, the quartet has gone into every school in Harlem on multiple occasions to foster “familiarity and engagement” through that outreach.
“The audience is intuitive, they can tell it’s genuine. One of the things that gives us the most pleasure is to hear from presenters — I never saw that many young people or people of color coming to these concerts — and they even like when people clap between movements, because they know these are newcomers,” Gavilán said. “That’s one of the things that makes our lives rewarding, to know we’re actually doing something very positive.”
Of the four founding Harlem Quartet members, White and Gavilán remain. As an ensemble, they enjoy spontaneity and improvisation; in choosing the two newer members, they not only looked for those qualities, but group chemistry as well. The chemistry makes the music come alive, White said. Enjoying who they play with, not only the music-making itself, translates “to the audience in a way that truly changes the space and makes the experience enhanced for everyone,” she said.
For White, music has ironically allowed her to enjoy silence more — and that’s while the music is happening. The space that music offers is healing to the message that society puts out that “we should hurry up and get over these emotions,” White said. For Gavilán as well, his own “emotional life becomes richer than my own personal experience because I am embodying somebody else’s personal experience at a very deep level.”
