April – Timeless
April 12th, 2026 • 3:00pm
Hotel Leo
Program
In 2013 Leslie Johnson and Pat Nelson created The Bellingham Chamber Music Society as an organization for local professionally trained musicians to perform chamber music for Bellingham audiences in intimate settings. In today’s concert we celebrate the beginnings of the Bellingham Chamber Music Society with a performance of founding member Leslie Johnson and her Seattle based quartet A Piacere Musica da Camera.
John Kim, Violin
HyeKyung Seo, Violin
Leslie Johnson, Viola
Brian Wharton, Cello
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart String Quartet No. 21 K. 575 (1789) ~23 min.
This quartet is the first in a series of three entitled ‘The Prussian’ quartets. The works are thought to have been commissioned by Friedrich Wilhelm II, the King of Prussia, who had a passion for music and was an accomplished amateur cellist. The cello has a particularly notable role in this quartet. The ‘Prussian’ set was to contain 6 quartets, but Mozart, in desperate financial straights sold the first three as a set to a publisher before completing the final works.
Mozart was deeply influenced by Haydn, known as the father of the string quartet, and won Haydn’s praise for his quartet writing. These would be the final works of this genre from this beloved composer.
In the composer’s own words:
“Silence is very important. The silence between the notes is as important as the notes themselves.”
Coleridge Taylor Perkinson String Quartet No. 1 ‘Calvary’ (1956) ~16 min.
Coleridge Perkinson (named after composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor) was an American composer whose works spanned classical, jazz, pop, dance, film and television scores. Perkinson’s career was rich and varied, from the concert halls of Europe, to the Max Roach jazz combo, to writing arrangements for the likes of Marvin Gaye, Harry Belafonte and Melvin Van Peebles.
Perkinson attended New York City’s High School of Music and Art, New York University, and the Manhattan School of Music. He was a co-founder of the NYC based Symphony of the New World, the first racially integrated orchestra in the United States. Among many other accomplishments and titles, he directed Jerome Robbins’ American Theater Lab and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, for whom he wrote a ballet inspired by Charlie Parker, For Bird, With Love. Read more from the Chicago Symphony.
The string quartet No. 1 is based on the classic spiritual Calvary. While rooted in classical tradition, the work is infused with spiritual and jazz-influenced harmonic changes.
In the composer’s own words:
“…when approached honestly, we find the similarities we have from one group of people, or beliefs, or disciplines to another, are greater than our differences. As people inhabiting this planet, I wish we could grasp that en masse.”
Samuel Barber String Quartet in B minor, Op. 11, (1935–36) ~20 min.
American born composer Samuel Barber wrote his string quartet when he was just 26 years old. Although he was a 20th century composer, 19th century musical ideas resonated with him and much of his music is infused with emotional expression and lyricism. The famous ‘Adagio for Strings’ serves, in its original form, as the second movement of this quartet. We are in for a treat to hear this movement as Barber first envisioned it before he revised it for string orchestra. The movement went on to have a life of its own as the ‘Adagio’ becoming one of the most recognizable pieces of classical music.
In the composer’s own words: On September 19, 1936, Barber wrote to cellist Orlando Cole of the Curtis String Quartet:
“I have just finished the slow movement of my quartet today—it is a knockout! Now for a Finale.”