Fledgling string quartet makes Arizona debut with Tucson concert

Tucson is getting a twofer of firsts next week when the fledgling Isidore String Quartet makes its Arizona debut at Leo Rich Theater.

Their concert on Wednesday, Dec. 6, with Arizona Friends of Chamber Music will be the first time we will see the 2-year-old quartet on an Arizona stage and the first time we’ll hear jazz pianist/composer Billy Childs’ String Quartet No. 2 “Awakening.”

“This is a very special program for us. This is the first program we crafted together and we call it the ‘Awakening’ program,” said Isidore violist Devin Moore. “The centerpiece is really the Billy Childs quartet.”

Childs, who played the Tucson Jazz Festival in 2015 with J.D. Souther, wrote “Awakening” in 2012 for the Grammy-winning Ying Quartet. The three-movement piece reflects on Childs’ heart-wrenching experience when his wife suffered a pulmonary embolism 10 years earlier.

The piece opens with “Wakeup Call,” recounting the phone call from the hospital that his wife was facing a life-threatening health crisis.

“This entire movement, utilizing so many extended techniques in the quartet, really exemplifies that sense of panic,” Moore said. “The metronome markings list a quarter note equals 170 or as fast as possible so you can imagine the kind of fury in this first movement.”

The second movement “The White Room” takes you into the hospital.

“You have the strings mimicking the sounds of the hospital machines and there’s sort of this sterile environment that’s juxtaposed with these two cadenzas in the violin and viola that are sort of these outbursts asking for help,” Moore said. “That sense of helplessness is really palpable in this movement.”

The piece concludes with “Song of Healing,” which Moore said expresses Childs’ relief that his wife survived and the stress that sort of close call puts on a relationship. The movement includes a beautiful conversation between the first violin and cello that Moore said signifies reconciliation.

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“It’s a really difficult piece, but all four of us connected so deeply with the story,” Moore said during a phone interview days after the quartet returned from a three-week European tour in late November. “We’ve taken it around the world at this point. Audiences have absolutely fallen in love with it in Germany and in the U.S. and Canada.”

Moore discovered Childs’ works during the pandemic when he and a colleague started a nonprofit that focused on uplifting underrepresented composers and musicians. They did a small concert series that was streamed and after getting some grant funding, decided to do a documentary that focused on five of those composers including Childs.

“As soon as we got vaccinated, we were on a plane in 2021 in May and we flew out to Los Angeles to do some interviews with him,” Moore said. “We went to his home and I absolutely fell in love with this musician.”

The next year, after Moore and his Isidore partners — violinists Adrian Steele and Phoenix Avalon and cellist Joshua McClendon — started to focus full-time on the quartet, they performed “Awakening” at the 2022 Banff International String Quartet Competition on a program with string quartets from Haydn and Beethoven that build on the theme of “awakening.”

Moore said Haydn’s String Quartet in C major is among the pioneering string quartets that became the template for the genre while Beethoven’s A minor Quartet No. 15 was the German composing giant’s awakening and gratitude to the universe and God for surviving a near fatal illness. As it turned out, the No. 15, composed in 1825, was among Beethoven’s late quartets written in his final years; he died two years later in 1827.

Moore has been playing with McClendon and Steele since the trio, graduates of Juilliard, met at the 2018 Aspen Music Festival in Colorado. Steele and McClendon introduced him to Avalon when they returned to Juilliard.

Tucson marks the ensemble’s 80th concert this year. Next season, they will program Childs’ String Quartet No. 3 “Unrequited” and Moore hinted that a recording of Childs’ works might be in their future.

“His three string quartets are on our program sheets for the next few years,” he said.