The Hawaii Concert Society’s season opening concert features a string quartet composed of musicians from four different parts of the world, but whose diversity has, if anything, enhanced their success on the international stage.
On Tuesday, the Verona Quartet — recent winners of Chamber Music America’s Cleveland String Quartet Award — will perform music by Felix Mendelssohn, Bela Bartok and Ludwig van Beethoven at the University of Hawaii’s Performing Arts Center. The concert will begin at 7:30 p.m.
The Verona’s multinational touring schedule mirrors the group’s diverse backgrounds: two men, two women, four nationalities.
Violist Abigail Rojansky grew up in the San Francisco Bay area, first violinist Jonathan Ong is from Singapore, second violinist Dorothy Ro is from Nova Scotia, and cellist Jonathan Dormand hails from Yorkshire, England.
The four were students together at the Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music. Rojansky and Ong are the original founding members, the other two joining a year or so later.
The group’s close musical connections pay off in performance. In a review of a recent concert in La Jolla, the San Diego Story reported that the music “was delivered with delicate perfection by the Verona players, who play and breathe as one.”
When asked how “playing and breathing as one” affects their individuality as musicians, violist Rojansky replied that they always strive for unity, “but what we don’t want to do is paint over the lines of our individuality. We want to celebrate them and use them to best effect, so we think it’s important to do both — to be unified and to be individuals.”
When asked if achieving both simultaneously is a delicate balance, Rojansky said, “That’s where six-hour rehearsals come in.”
The Verona Quartet’s Hilo concert includes as its second and third offerings, two string quartets from the 19th and 20th centuries that were revolutions in their times. The concert begins with a quartet by the young Mendelssohn, unquestionably the greatest teenage composer of chamber music. It will be followed by Bartok’s Third Quartet, one of the masterworks of modern music.
Following the intermission, the quartet will perform Beethoven’s first Razumovsky Quartet, which both early performers and early audiences, stuck in the conventions of the past, found incomprehensible. “Surely you do not consider this music?” asked the bemused violinist of the quartet that Count Razumovsky had hired to debut it in 1807. “Not for you,” replied the composer, “but for a later age.”
Tickets for Tuesday’s concert ($25 general admission/$20 for those 60-plus/$10 for students) are available at the Most Irresistible Shop and at Basically Books until the afternoon of the concert. They also may be ordered by phone at the UH-Hilo Box office (932-7490). Tickets also will be available on the evening of the concert at the UHH Box Office, from 6:45 p.m. Seating is unreserved.
Information about the full concert season and on obtaining discounted season tickets is available at the Hawaii Concert Society’s Facebook page or by phoning 959-4064.