Tuesday Musical Association and the Akron Art Museum are set to kick off their fourth season of cutting-edge, genre-crossing performances with the FUZE! series, which will begin at 6:30 p.m. Friday with the Calder Quartet and Iva Bittova.
The intimate concerts, held in the museum’s 160-seat auditorium at 1 S. High St., feature young, classically trained musicians who test new musical frontiers by fusing standard repertoire with the work of contemporary composers.
“The reason the FUZE! series began was to introduce younger people to classical music,” said Barbara Feld, executive director of Tuesday Musical.
Her passion for bringing in groundbreaking classical musicians goes back to 1995, when she presented the Kronos Quartet for Tuesday Musical. At the time, the string quartet’s cutting-edge work seemed foreign to Akron audiences, Feld said.
“There has to be an audience for new music, these edgy ensembles,” she told herself at the time.
Fifteen years ago, Feld and Mitchell Kahan, CEO and director of the Akron Art Museum, began talking about a collaboration for presenting forward-thinking chamber musicians. When the new museum building opened in 2007 and its auditorium became available as a small concert venue, it paved the way for the series that fuses both musical genres and the worlds of music and visual art.
The attendance in the last three years validates Feld’s belief that there’s a local audience for edgy chamber music: The concert series sold out in its first and third years.
FUZE! musicians who are pushing the limits of the classical music landscape have ranged from the string quartet ETHEL — which has appeared twice — to electric violinist Tracy Silverman, who played an eclectic acoustic concert at the museum and also inspired students during his visits to local schools, according to Feld.
Establishing a dialogue between the artists and Akron students is a key component of the series. The Calder Quartet will do a lecture/demonstration Thursday at Miller South School for the Visual and Performing Arts and give a talk on ensemble leadership Friday at the University of Akron.
That talk will continue to cross boundaries: It will be presented to strings students, arts management students and business school students.
Violinist Andrew Bulbrook of the Calder Quartet, speaking in a recent phone interview from Los Angeles, said the leadership program his string quartet teaches was inspired by a current trend in companies to function with a less defined, nonhierarchical management structure.
The Calder Quartet, which was formed in 1998 at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, began exploring this style of leadership through USC’s Center for Effective Organizations.
“It’s a tough thing to have four people moving with the utmost commitment at the same time,” Bulbrook said of the quartet’s democratic approach.
The ensemble leadership program, which can be applied to both musicians and business people, focuses on finding shared goals, developing talents and leadership abilities in each member and separating ideas from ego.
The Calder Quartet, also featuring violinist Benjamin Jacobson, violist Jonathan Moerschel and cellist Eric Byers, made its professional debut a decade ago in Sedona, Ariz. The quartet’s name was inspired by the late American sculptor Alexander Calder.
“What looks very free and simple in many ways was the product of daily work in the studio,” Bulbrook said of Calder’s art. Of his quartet’s art, he said, “We like to work. We work hard at it.”
The Calder Quartet’s performances run the gamut from a fall appearance with contemporary composer Terry Riley and DJ Dave Muller at an art gallery in Los Angeles, to their performances this weekend with violin virtuoso Joshua Bell and bassist/composer Edgar Meyer at the Laguna Beach Festival.
On Feb. 1, the string quartet appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman with indie rock band Airborne Toxic Event, with whom they did a joint nine-city tour in 2010.
“Rock ’n’ roll is kind of an interesting thing for us to work on because it was never really part of our background, so it was really liberating in a way,” Bulbrook said of the tour. “It’s really fun to have the variety and you really realize what’s common about music.”
The group’s musical and cultural curiosities expose them to a wide variety of entertainers: During his recent New York visit, Bulbrook found himself chatting with everyone from Letterman guest Howard Stern, who dished about a Stradivarius violin for sale on the Upper East Side; to Danny DeVito, whom he bumped into at an experimental music concert in Chinatown.
Tuesday Musical’s Feld, who had been trying to book the Calder Quartet for several years, jumped at the chance to bring them in with Czech violinist and vocalist Bittova, who performed with the quartet last year for the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Viva! & Gala series. The musicians met in 2009 through Tom Welsh, associate director of music at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Here’s how Bulbrook described Bittova’s passionate style: “She’s this incredible performance force of nature. It just all kind of flows through her in this incredibly organic way.”
Akron’s program will include works by Fred Frith, Leos Janacek and Bela Bartok, inspired by Moravian poetry and folk songs of Bittova’s Czech homeland. Her vocals include sound effects such as trills, squeaks, clicks and bird imitations. In one of the Bartok pieces, Bittova buzzes like a mosquito.
Frith’s Lelekovice, which will be performed in Akron, was inspired by the composer’s visit to Bittova’s Czech hometown of that name. Bittova, also an actress, moves around during her performance, improvising on violin and voice at the same time.
“She’ll create a pitch and then create overtones. It’s really cool and she’s a great actress, too,” Bulbrook said.
Here’s the rest of the FUZE! season schedule:
• The Sixth Floor Trio, March 16. The ensemble members met during their studies at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music. They explore connections between musical styles including bluegrass, klezmer, classical, jazz, ancient music and contemporary rock. The chamber group is comprised of pianist/clarinetist Teddy Abrams, violinist/bassoonist Harrison Hollingsworth and clarinetist Johnny Teyssier.
• Pablo Ziegler and Maya Beiser in Canyengue: The Soul of Tango, April 6. Israeli-born cellist Beiser will return after her performance in the 2009 inaugural season, this time with Pablo Ziegler, an Argentine Latin Grammy-winning pianist and composer. Canyengue is a raw, earthy style of Argentine tango.
Cost for FUZE! concerts is $30 general admission, $25 for Tuesday Musical and Akron Art Museum members, and $15 for students. Call 330-376-9198 Ext. 268 or see www.akronartmuseum.org. Each concert begins at 6:30 p.m. and is followed by a reception with the artists.
Arts writer Kerry Clawson may be reached at 330-996-3527 or kclawson@thebeaconjournal.com.
