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In years past, the quartet has performed Baroque, Classical, Romantic and Contemporary repertoire at major Alberta venues including Muttart Hall at Alberta College, Grant MacEwan’s John L. Haar Theatre, The King’s University College Nicholas B. Knoppers Hall, McDougall United Church (for the 1997 Brahms Chamber Music Festival), Robertson Wesley United Church, Holy Trinity Anglican Church, Convocation Hall at the University of Alberta, Augustana University College, and Yellowknife Arts Centre.

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Strathcona String Quartet Sets Place At The Table for Blues Alongside Classical

An Arts Jasper November 23, 2005 Concert Review
by Gregory Deagle
Jasper Booster

The recital began with Beethoven's String Quartet in B Flat Major, Opus 130.  At a playing time of approximately forty five minutes, this mature work written when the great composer had succumbed to nearly total deafness, ranks among one of the longest compositions for string quartet in music history.

It's six ambitious movements chart a difficult course through bizarre syncopations and challenging entrances punctuated now and then by abrupt changes in tempo, so abrupt in fact that the piece  seemed to occasionally morph into an altogether different piece resulting in a provocative psychological tension.  One listener even suggested with this composition Beethoven breached the limits of traditionalism by venturing  perilously close to the avant garde. As eccentric a work as it is, the Strathcona String Quartet met with every one of it's demands with due competence and elegance particularly in the Finale where an industrious basso line kept violist Moni Mathew well occupied.

With bio-notes that read like an eventful Jack London novel, an unassuming violinist, composer and conductor named George Andrix complements the Edmonton-based Quartet's line-up.  Andrix introduced the Shostakovich  String Quartet No. 8 in C Minor, Opus 110, starkly known as "In Memory Of The Victims Of Fascism And War," with a sobering preamble.

Dmitri Shostakovich was an embittered Russian composer, he explained, whose genius and personality were more than out of place in the Stalinist Russia of the thirties and forties.  As a convinced believer in Russian Socialism, Shostakovich  was brutally attacked in the official Soviet newspaper 'Pravda' for leftist distortion in 1936.  Realizing it was a fight to the death for his conscience as an artist and creator, he shunned society for fifteen years. During this time he wrote five symphonies and several string quartets including the 8th Quartet, an opus which he firmly insisted would be his last.  Luckily, for Western music it wasn't.

Typical of all of Shostakovich's works, the 8th Quartet is marked by emotional extremes, tragic intensity, grotesque and bizarre wit, humour, parody and savage sarcasm.  He even "signed" the indictment with the melody of his musical monogram, DSCH (D, E-flat, C, B).  This somewhat eerie grouping of notes forms a sort of tonal motif that recurs throughout the piece as it moves from one tragic movement to the next, the third being the Allegretto or "Dance Of Death" as it is commonly known.  This grim passage is adorned with a sardonic trill that quivers vulnerably like a pale leaf in a shrill wind.

In the atmosphere of the Great Terror that gripped Russia, Stalin's KGB officers would comb the streets  ruthlessly apprehending innocent civilians and intelligentsia. The Largo movement featured a sinister build-up of minor chords culminating in three aggressively executed down bows. Convincingly played, this clever piece of musical drama evoked the KGB's dreaded knocks on doors behind which entire families feared for their lives.

For a program so entrenched in deliciously morose works of tortured genius, the Aaron Copland-like "Bashaw Boogie" written by Alberta composer, Roger Deegan and George Andrix's "Shades Of Blue" were informal and delightful.  Andrix comes by his proficiency with blues honestly having composed, produced,  played all the parts and even sang on his own CD, The Complete Blues Viola.  "Shades Of Blue" took the audience on a sort of musical tour through blues inventions and studies.  From deconstructing then reconstructing blues chords ("Reconstruction") to a loose, improvisational jam ("Wandering Boogie"), these five short pieces displayed the lighter side of string music while setting a congenial place at the table for blues alongside classical.

Jasper was left in awe of the Strathcona String Quartet's outstanding
degree of musical understanding and professionalism, and their apparent
comfort level in undertaking and performing works that run the gamut of
human experience.

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