JACK Quartet with Shai Wosner
One held note in Henry Purcell’s music sets things in motion. We join pianist Shai Wosner to move between solo piano, string quartet, and piano quintet, making unexpected connections across five centuries of music. Works by Ruth Crawford Seeger, Wolfgang Rihm, Christopher Otto, Amy Williams, George Benjamin, and Thomas Adès take turns playing with rhythm, momentum, and surprise. We invite your audience into a chamber music evening with a curious streak, where familiar combinations of instruments keep finding new ways to move.
“The uniquely human capacity to become rhythmically entrained with other humans is an incredible (and incredibly mysterious) part of our cognitive evolution that I take for granted. This program is an exploration of the extreme edges of rhythmic experimentation across 500 years— it is also a celebration of this universal and innate human ability to measure and predict cycles of time.”
Program
Henry Purcell: Fantasy Upon One Note (c. 1680; arranged for piano quintet) • 4 min
Ruth Crawford Seeger: String Quartet (1931) • 10 min
Wolfgang Rihm: Interscriptum (2000 to 2002) • 14 min
Christopher Otto: Miserere, after Nathaniel Giles (2023; original 1594) • 5 min
Amy Williams: Cineshape 2 (2007) • 10 min
George Benjamin: Relativity Rag (1984) • 5 min in this program
Thomas Adès: Piano Quintet (2000) • 20 min
Total duration
68 minutes
Personnel
JACK Quartet
Shai Wosner: piano

