Performances + Events
Last year, Borromeo String Quartet violinist Kristopher Tong expressed an interest to Mehmet Ali Sanlıkol in performing one of the composer’s string quartets. Sanlıkol hadn’t been commissioned for or composed a string quartet since he was a student. More significantly, he hadn’t composed a string quartet since having a sort of epiphany, in 2000, that brought him closer to the classical Ottoman and Turkish music of his roots. The conversation with Tong led to the commissioning of a new work that the Borromeo String Quartet, NEC’s faculty ensemble-in-residence, will premiere on a Nov. 25 recital. The program, themed “inspiration from worlds far away,” will also include the second movement of Gunther Schuller’s String Quartet No. 3, Aaron Jay Kernis’s String Quartet No. 4, “Oasis,” and Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 15 in A minor, Op. 132.
This past spring, Sanlıkol ’00 MM, ’04 DMA — a faculty member in the Conservatory’s music history and musicology departments, and director of the Intercultural Institute — was invited to participate in a conference at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, where he previously held a postdoctoral fellowship, after graduating from NEC. During the symposium, Sanlıkol attended a talk that focused on 14th- or 15th-century drawings attributed to Mehmed Siyah-Kalem.
“These were shocking,” Sanlıkol said, describing the drawings as bearing some resemblance to contemporaneous Central Asian works while possessing entirely unique qualities. According to Sanlıkol, the drawings are “most likely from Eastern Anatolia or Central Asia” and incorporate shamanistic, pagan, and Islamic elements. This distinctive blend — and four specific images in particular — resonated deeply with him.
“I wanted to create a musical world that represented these four drawings,” Sanlıkol explained. Each image inspired one movement of his string quartet, The Demons and Humans of Siyah-Kalem. Sanlıkol had the opportunity to hear the Borromeo Quartet rehearse the piece earlier this month. “They got it,” he said, reflecting on how the quartet captured the musical world he envisioned from these centuries-old, faraway drawings.
Another world the Borromeo Quartet will explore through its Nov. 25 recital is one the late Gunther Schuller visited in composing his String Quartet No. 3. In its second movement, (Canzona) Schuller evoked the music of Francesco Antonio Bonporti, who lived in Italy from 1672 to 1749.
“He actually had this incredibly distant model,” Borromeo Quartet violinist Nicholas Kitchen said of the harmonic structure Schuller explored, “but of course they became Gunther Schuller chords!” Schuller, who served as NEC’s president from 1967 to 1977, died in 2015. NEC will celebrate his musical legacy with a concert on Nov. 22, which would’ve been Schuller’s 99th birthday.
In its Nov. 25 recital program, the Borromeo Quartet will not only traverse time and place but also engage with the music of the moment. Aaron Jay Kernis’s String Quartet No. 4, written specifically for the Borromeo Quartet, was premiered in 2018 at the Tippet Rise Art Center in Fishtail, Montana. The piece’s third movement features a layered element: 31 tracks recorded by the quartet in NEC’s Eben Jordan Ensemble Room. The tracks accompany the live performance. Kitchen described the recorded part as “giant stacks of notes that just float in the air.”
The program will conclude with a performance of Beethoven’s Op. 132, a work whose “significance as a piece is enormous,” Kitchen said. The work’s third movement, the title of which translates to “song of thanksgiving to God for recovery from an illness, in the Lydian mode,” evokes “a completely different world,” Kitchen said, explaining that Beethoven had recovered from a serious illness before writing the music and died a few years after that. Today, 200 years later, Kitchen is teaching Beethoven’s Op. 132 at NEC.
The Borromeo String Quartet will perform in Jordan Hall on Monday, Nov. 25, at 7:30 p.m.
Kitchen will lead a workshop called Inspiration from Worlds Far Away on Wednesday, Nov. 20, at 7 p.m., in Eben Jordan Ensemble Room. Using the Borromeo String Quartet’s Nov. 25 recital program as a discussion topic, Kitchen’s workshop will explore audience engagement through effective speaking.
