Music of Ezra Laderman, Vol. 3

In the seventies and again in the eighties, Ezra Laderman had issued weighty statements, entire worlds for two violins, viola and cello. The first was his three-movement Fifth Quartet, composed in 1976; it lasts three quarters of an hour, incorporates historical models including a sonata form and a Baroque dance suite, and draws on "a rich palette of composing: tonal, serial, aleatoric." But its size makes the Laderman Fifth Quartet impractical to program in its entirety. More often, quartets program the work's movements individually, finding each to be a coherent and satisfying statement. This performance history of the Fifth Quartet led Laderman to re-think his approach to the medium and to multi-movement compositions. A trilogy of single-movement quartets - the Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth - comprised the next such weighty statement. The Sixth Quartet was complete by December 1980; the double bar line was put on the Eighth almost five years later, the composer having reached sixty-one years of age. The composer regarded these three quartets as "the payoff from this mother lode" of the Fifth. Each of the three was performed many times before the first performance of the entire trilogy took place, in May 1989 at Merkin Concert Hall's Music Today series in New York City. There the performers - the Audubon, Blair, and Colorado Quartets - gathered to celebrate Laderman's 65th birthday.