Telegraph Quartet Performs Schoenberg, Ravel at Santa Rosa Junior College

Telegraph Quartet will be performing their program "Divergent Paths," which features a pair of works that could not be more different in style. Both of these compositions serve as a snapshot of the wealth of musical styles that would burst out of the turn of the 20th century and evolve exponentially over the course of that century.

The performance begins with Ravel's String Quartet, which was written just as he was finally finding his voice as a composer, having been swept up by Debussy's "Impressionism," and literally inspired by Debussy's own quartet. It is a clear break from the excesses of German-Romanticism. By contrast, Schoenberg described his first string quartet as a culmination of the end of that very German-Romantic musical tradition that Ravel was trying to eschew. Greatly inspired by Wagner, Schoenberg manages to pack an unending wealth of musical themes and tortuous counterpoint into the four voices of the quartet, creating a kind of Wagnerian epic, in chamber form.

The Telegraph Quartet (Eric Chin and Joseph Maile, violins; Pei-Ling Lin, viola; Jeremiah Shaw, cello) formed in 2013 with an equal passion for the standard chamber music repertoire and contemporary, non-standard works alike. The group is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and is currently on the chamber music faculty at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music as the Quartet-in-Residence.