View the summary of the concerts offered during the year 2000–01
and a description of our reservation-by-lottery system.

The Chamber Music at the Clark series continues in its sixth season, 2000-01, with four concerts: one in November (the Lanier Trio), two in January (the Pacifica Quartet and the Rossetti Quartet), and one in February (the Artemis Quartet). A special musical program commemorating the poet John Dryden will be presented on campus on December 3. Finally, two concerts are planned in the newly established Clark Recitals series: the Italian ensemble Il Ruggiero performs Monteverdi's Il ritorno di Ulisse in Patria, on December 10; and Tom Beghin presents one of the programs in his cycle of Haydn's keyboard sonatas, on May 19.

Please note also the concert of La Turbulente, on November 4, presented by the American Association of Teachers of French and the Alliance Française of Los Angeles

Reservations by Lottery:——

Extremely high demand and limited seating, both at the Clark and at the campus venue, require that reservations to concerts be made on the basis of a prepaid, mail-in lottery. Admission fees and deadlines for submissions to the reservation lotteries are given after each concert's listing. Reservation-by-lottery forms are available at the Center. Reservations are confirmed, or forms and checks returned, by mail well in advance of each concert.

Requests for additional information and for reservation forms should be addressed to the Center by e-mail ( ) or by phone (310-206-8552).

To receive routine mailings about music programs, please sign up to be on the Center/Clark mailing list.

Recognized for their "lavish, impeccable ensemble and golden tone," the Lanier Trio has performed throughout the United States and across Europe since 1979, maintaining its current membership since 1986. As noted by Strad Magazine, "the musical collaboration here is high, with a palpable level of comfort among the players that can take years to find." The feeling of ensemble unanimity is paramount--fine points of phrasing and ensemble are outstandingly executed; little wonder that the trio has enjoyed performances in places as far-flung as Hawaii and Warsaw, where the leading Polish critic raved that they "overwhelmed the audience with excitement in a ravishing performance." Little wonder, as well, that William Preucil has remained a member of the trio, even as he enjoys his appointment, since 1995, as concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra.

Named in honor of the Georgia poet and musician Sidney Lanier, the trio has produced notable recordings. Their two-disk release of Antonin Dvorák's "Four Piano Trios"--regarded as four of the glories of the chamber music literature--was listed by Time Magazine as one of the "best of 1993"; the recording has been praised for its fine musicianship, its warmth in their treatment of Dvorák's wealth of melody and countermelody, its excellent instrumental balance. With the aid of a grant from the Aaron Copland Fund, the Lanier Trio has more recently recorded selected chamber works by American composer Stephen Paulus, who, according to critics, does not hesitate when it comes to making demands on the players. Many of the Paulus works were written for these musicians, and the artists come through with sympathy as well as artistry. The ensemble's world premiere recording of these finely crafted, eloquently expressive pieces by Stephen Paulus is remarkable.

After a performance in Atlanta, one reviewer was moved to comment, "Playing with a rapport as if they'd been concertizing together all their lives, with a spontaneity as if they were actively engaging these works for the first time, and a bravura that only comes when you've left any worries about note-perfection far behind in the dust, theirs was direct emotional communication . . . between performers and audience" of a kind rarely seen. 

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In a program dedicated to musical works composed to texts by John Dryden, soloists, chorus, and orchestra from the UCLA musicology and music departments will perform works by Henry Purcell and Louis Grabu under the direction of the distinguished scholar and conductor Philip Brett.

- PROGRAM -

Henry Purcell, Sonata for Trumpet and Strings in D Major

Henry Purcell, Selections from King Arthur, Act 3

Henry Purcell, Chaconne for Strings in G Minor

Louis Grabu, Selections from Albion and Albanius

Admission fee: $10
Reservations lottery closes on November 1

This Italian musical ensemble, founded in Bologna by Emanuela Marcante, has made extensive tours of Europeand North America with programs of seventeenth-, eighteenth-,  and nineteenth-century music. Their original productions of baroque opera, which often employ improvisation, preserve a historical perspective even as they look toward connections with the principles of contemporary music. Their repertoire ranges from Monteverdi, Scarlatti, and Salomone Rossi’s Hebrew music to Beethoven, Rossini, and Donizetti.

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With an impressive array of awards to its credit, including the 1998 Naumburg Chamber Music Award, the 1997 Nathan Wedeen Management Award at the Concert Artists Guild Competition, and the 1996 Grand Prize at the Coleman Chamber Music Competition, the brilliant young Pacifica Quartet is earning a reputation for distinctive music-making. The New York Times admired the quartet's "close togetherness through shifts and swerves of speed and texture," and the Los Angeles Times found that "their confidence is high and their playing compellingly expressive." From its inception, the Pacifica has enjoyed an active touring schedule, which has recently taken it as far afield as Australia and Panama, and coast-to-coast from Los Angeles and San Francisco to Lincoln Center's' Alice Tully Hall in New York. Their 1999-2000 season included performances in Honolulu, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and New York. The Quartet has participated in numerous festivals, including Music at Gretna, the Bellingham Music Festival, Strings in the Mountains, the Sedona Chamber Music Festival, La Jolla Summerfest, and the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, which sponsored the Pacifica on a New Mexico tour in 1996.

Founded in Los Angeles in 1994, the Quartet is now based in Chicago, where it serves as resident quartet at the University of Chicago and the Music Institute of Chicago. Its multiple and varied residency activities include concert series at both institutions. In addition, the quartet is involved in the Music Integration Project, an innovative educational outreach program that provides musical performances and teacher training in inner-city elementary schools. In the spring of 1999, the Pacifica had the honor of being selected for a two-week residency with National Public Radio's "Performance Today" in Washington D.C. 

The members of the Rossetti String Quartet, all with distinguished backgrounds as soloists and chamber music players, are unified by a deep abiding love for the string quartet literature and its presentation in a natural, yet very personal style. The quartet's repertoire is firmly based in the classic/romantic quartet style and extends into the contemporary literature. Among the group's engagements in North America last season were concerts in Mexico, North Carolina, and California, most notably in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. In a residency at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the Rossetti Quartet performed a concert of Mendelssohn, Kodaly and Dvorák, held master classes, and engaged in other outreach activities. Overseas, the ensemble made several appearances in the Netherlands, with pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, playing works by Mozart, Kodaly and Franck.

When the members of the ensemble joined forces, their choice of the nineteenth-century Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti as their namesake seemed appropriate on several levels. Rossetti's work, from a unique painter's perspective, represents ideals which are close to those of the quartet members. Not the least of these is a return to naturalism and lifelike color in a world grown complacent with the style of its own time. Through the vivid use of color, whether in music or in painting, focal points come into relief and recede in what seems to be a living tableau.

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On its North American debut tour in March 1998, the Artemis Quartet performed nine concerts in twelve days, including appearances in Chicago, Washington, New Orleans, Cincinnati, and Columbus, where the critic called their "electrifying performance" a "stunning, even visceral, experience."

The Artemis Quartet's meteoric rise to renown across Europe began with its sweep of the top awards at the German Music Competition in 1995, the Munich Competition in 1996, and the Borciani Competition in 1997. The Artemis has gone on to appear in major venues from the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam to the Beethovenhaus in Bonn and the Salzburg Music Festival. Its performances have inspired such critical superlatives as "already at the top" (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) and "a young wonder" (Braunschweiger Zeitung).

Formed at the Musikhochschule in Lubbock, Germany, where its members studied with Walter Levin, formerly of the LaSalle Quartet, the quartet also worked with the Alban Berg Quartet in Cologne, and in master classes with the Emerson and Juilliard Quartets. For the 1997-1998 season, it was in residence at the Musikhochschule in Vienna, at the invitation of the Alban Berg Quartet, where it made a two-concert debut at the Vienna Konzerthaus. The Quartet now resides in Berlin.

In the 1999-2000 season, the Artemis Quartet toured Japan, returned to the Concertgebouw and the Vienna Konzerthaus, and made a twelve-concert North American tour that included appearances at Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall, the Library of Congress in Washington, and UCLA. The group's January 2000 appearance at the Clark met with an overwhelmingly enthusiastic response, and we are pleased to present the Artemis for the second time.

An expert artist on early pianos and their predecessors, the harpsichords and clavichords, Tom Beghin, Assistant Professor in UCLA’s music department, is presenting  a fascinating series of concerts devoted to Franz Josef Haydn's keyboard sonatas performed on period instruments. For any lover of eighteenth-century keyboard music, the experience of hearing Haydn's masterpieces played on the instruments for which they were composed is not to be missed. In the first program of the cycle, and his first appearance at the Clark, last June, Mr. Beghin performed the "Auenbrugger Sonatas" (1780) on a beautiful replica of an Anton Walter fortepiano, an instrument whose acoustics invite performers to highlight the interior architecture of compositions: phrase structures, articulation patterns, and characteristic rhetorical gestures become transparent, allowing audiences to savor the finer points of Haydn's music.

In the cycle's fifth program, the second at the Clark, Mr. Beghin will play the sonatas referred to by Haydn in his own catalogue as “6 Sonaten von Anno 776” (Hob.xvi:27–32). Finished by 1776 and published in 1778, these were Haydn’s second set of published sonatas, after the six dedicated to Prince Nikolaus Esterházy (1773) and before those dedicated to the sisters von Auenbrugger. With a content ranging from comical to serious, carefree to troubled, simple to complex, the “Anno 776” compositions satisfied perfectly the keen musical appetites of the new and growing market of amateur players. Tom Beghin will perform these wonderfully varied and entertaining sonatas alternately on the “old” harpsichord and the “new” fortepiano. 

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