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Fred Lerdahl in Portrait at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Oct. 01, 2017

Fred Lerdahl in Portrait at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

On October 5, Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum presented a portrait concert celebrating the music of Fred Lerdahl, with performances by the Daedalus String Quartet, Boston Symphony Orchestra bassist Edwin Barker and soprano Elizabeth Fischborn. The program included Lerdahl’s recent Chaconne, commissioned by the Daedalus Quartet, as well as performances of Give and Take, Fire and Ice and Waltzes.

Chaconne marks the second collaboration between Lerdahl and the Daedalus Quartet. The composer notes the work’s differing character from his earlier three-quartet cycle, with Chaconne featuring more “transparent and playful” expressive qualities. “Many of its textures,” he writes, “emerge from little canons, not unlike the rounds that children sing.”


(Fire and Ice performed by the Departure Duo; Nina Guo, soprano; Eddie Kass, bass)


Lerdahl brilliantly captures the terror and drama of Robert Frost’s poem in his Fire and Ice for soprano and double bass, which was commissioned by the Tanglewood Music Center. His setting explores different extremes of ordinary speech prosody derived from various recorded readings of the poem (including readings by Richard Burton and Robert Frost himself). 


Waltzes, a set of twelve virtuoso waltzes and the earliest work on the program, was composed in 1981 for the Spoleto Music Festival. The program also includes a performance of Lerdahl’s recent work for violin and cello, Give and Take, which debuted with Ernst Kovacic and Anssi Karttunen at the Helsinki Music Centre in 2015. 

For more information on Fred Lerdahl, visit schott-music.com. 

Fred Lerdahl
Chaconne (2016)
for string quartet
19’

Give and Take (2014)
for violin and cello
14’

Fire and Ice (2015)
for high soprano and contrabass
text (Eng) by Robert Frost
6’

Waltzes (1981)
for violin, viola, cello and double bass
21’

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