Gotham Quartet Set to Give First Recital

Gotham Quartet Set to Give First Recital

BY DAVID KAPLAN
Rice News Staff
November 4, 1999

Lun Jiang, a violinist in the Gotham Quartet, says deadpan that he has known the other violinist in the group since he was a young boy. No kidding. He and Quan Jiang are identical twins.

They aren’t the only ones in the group who feel like family. “I’ve always wished I had a brother,” says violist Sheila Browne. “Now it’s like I have three.” But unlike some brothers and sisters, “we still haven’t had a fight,” notes cellist Cheng-Hou Lee. They arrived at the Shepherd School this semester after winning a national competition qualifying them to spend two years studying in the Quartet Training Program under the direction of Professor of Cello Paul Katz. The Anderson Quartet is also studying at Rice for two years.

On Nov. 11 the Gotham Quartet will give its first Shepherd School recital. The quartet will perform Haydn’s “Quartet in D minor, Op. 76, No. 2, ‘Quinten'”; “Dvorak’s Quartet in F Major, Op. 96 ‘American'”; and Debussy’s “Quartet in G minor, Op. 10.” The concert will be at 8 p.m. in Duncan Recital Hall.

All four members are accomplished musicians. Individually, they have appeared in major concert halls in the United States, Europe and Asia, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Schauspielhaus Berlin and Taiwan National Concert Hall. Lun and Quan Jiang have recorded a soon-to-be released compact disk on the Eroica label as the Jiang Duo. They now all are focused exclusively on their work as a quartet. They’ve been together only since January.

Says Katz, “I love their eager attitude, their hunger to be the best that they can be and their drive and intensity as performers. Like a race car, they most enjoy their high gear, but they’re learning to downshift and give nuance and variety to their playing. Everyone is extremely talented, and I think they’re off to a wonderful start.”

The Jiang brothers are receiving private instruction from Sergiu Luca, professor of violin; Browne is being taught by Karen Ritscher, visiting associate professor of viola; and Lee is receiving instruction from Katz.

Browne observes that it’s daunting to be a young quartet, fresh out of graduate school, “in a field with quartets twice your age.” It is also a balancing act, she says, in that “you still have to find a way to earn a living.” The Quartet Training Program allows a quartet like the Gotham to develop its music without having to worry about income for two years.

“There are so many facets of our music that we’re learning now,” says Browne. For example, she recalls that Professor of Violin Kenneth Goldsmith recently told the group that the playing of Haydn requires a “virtuosic” approach. He noted that the term virtuosic comes from the word “virtue” and refers to the search for the truth in music as opposed to the mere achievement of technical proficiency.

The Gotham Quartet is devoted to community outreach. This spring they will work with local inner-city children, in conjunction with Project GRAD, a nonprofit, educational reform group and Da Camera of Houston. Over the past few years, members of the Gotham, working through the Midori Foundation, volunteered to teach music to Manhattan schoolchildren.

The Jiang brothers are graduates of the Manhattan School of Music. Cheng and Browne are graduates of the Juilliard School of Music. Browne also studied in Germany with renowned violist Kim Kashkashian. As a boy in Tawain, Lee studied cello with Yo-Yo Ma’s father.

Their name Gotham is a reference to New York, the city where they met.

Offstage, they are a playful group, and at times, they really do seem like siblings–when, for example, Browne explains, tongue-in-cheek, why she enjoys her life these days: “I get to order three boys around.”