Haydn Voyages: Music at the Maritime
The Hausmann Quartet and Maritime Museum of San Diego are excited to partner to present the ninth season of Haydn Voyages: Music at the Maritime, a quarterly concert series performed aboard one of the Museum’s ten historic world-class vessels, the 1898 steam ferryboat Berkeley that operated for 60 years on San Francisco Bay.
Concerts aboard the Berkeley, also a National Historic Landmark docked in downtown San Diego next to Star of India, explore the evolution of the string quartet through the lens of Joseph Haydn's quartet cycle.
The programming and performances by this accomplished young foursome set his works alongside those of master composers from our own era and stretching back to Haydn’s musical ancestors. As the father of the string quartet and one of history's most innovative composers, Haydn is an ideal guide to this exploration of some of the most powerful, creative music ever written.
All concerts are Sundays at 2:30 pm. Each creative program will include informative and entertaining commentary between selections from noted UC Santa Barbara musicologist Derek Katz.
February 18 – Haydn & Hollywood
We open the ninth season of our Haydn Voyages series with a program featuring two Haydn quartets that show the master composer at the peak of his creative powers, though 15 years apart (his opus 33, no. 4 from 1781 and his later opus 76, no. 1 from 1796). Between these two we’ll take a trip up the coast for a taste of Hollywood, featuring Erich Korngold’s second quartet from 1933, when he was starting to establish himself as one of the great composers of Hollywood film scores. Nicole Lizee’s Another Living Soul (written in 2016 for the Kronos Quartet’s 50 For the Future project) is a wild ride: her tribute to stop motion animation calls for actual bells and whistles!
May 19 – Night Music
Artists through the centuries have been drawn to the darkness and mystery of the night for inspiration, and this concert showcases two seminal works from this tradition. After a typically inventive Haydn quartet to open the program, a “May gray” San Diego afternoon on the water may set the scene for French composer Henri Dutilleux’s Ainsi La Nuit (Thus the Night), a 20th-century masterpiece. The second half of this show will feature Arnold Schoenberg’s lushly impressionistic Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) for string sextet, with local stars Travis Maril (viola) and Elizabeth Brown (cello) joining the Hausmann Quartet.
September 15 – Light & Shadow
The study in contrasts that is September’s program will feature the first performance of a work by Johannes Brahms on the Haydn Voyages series, as his final string quartet (opus 67) anchors a program filled with exciting variety, a characteristic we’ve come to expect and appreciate in Haydn’s work; his opus 55, no. 3 on this program certainly offers its share. The afternoon will open with This is It, a 2023 work by Reena Esmail in which she “asks the musicians to explore being present with one another…Each movement opens up a tiny, mutually created universe for just a few precious breaths.”
November 24 – Revolution
When we think of art as “revolutionary,” we are most often considering the content of the work itself. This program also asks us to consider the context of its creation, as the opening Haydn quartet (opus 55, no. 2 “Razor”) is followed by Victor Ullmann’s third string quartet, written in 1943 in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The second half features Gabriela Smith’s raucous Carrot Revolution, and the ninth season ends in epic fashion with Beethoven’s final work, his Quartet in F Major, opus 135.
Haydn Voyages is generously underwritten by pH Projects, with additional support from the City of San Diego's Commission for Arts and Culture and The Conrad Prebys Foundation.
