Meet Axiom Quartet, chamber musicians with punk sensibilities.
If you need one thing accomplished, ask a busy individual to do it. Higher but, ask Patrick Moore, a founding member of the Axiom Quartet, who’s on a mission to lift the cultural notion of town. “I would like individuals to really feel as enthusiastic about coming to a string quartet live performance in Houston as they’d going to listen to the Vienna Philharmonic in Vienna,” the cellist says.
With that in thoughts, Axiom has thrown down the gauntlet and is dedicating its 2025–2026 season to performing, so as, the entire cycle of Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s 15 string quartets for his or her first-ever stay presentation in Houston. “They’re all spectacular items,” says Moore. “It simply appeared like the correct time to attempt to do all of them.” Solely a handful of ensembles have taken on the complete cycle, together with the Jerusalem Quartet, which carried out the works in Cleveland this previous April, and the London-based Brodsky Quartet.
Not one of the members of Axiom—along with cellist Moore, there are violinists Matt Lammers and Tim Peters and violist Katie Carrington—can recall precisely who amongst them proposed the concept of performing the Shostakovich cycle in its entirety. They do bear in mind it was mentioned over lunch at Fadi’s in Meyerland, and somebody identified that 2025 could be the fiftieth anniversary of the composer’s loss of life. “It sounded, on the time, fairly far-fetched,” says Peters, who can be a primary violinist with the Houston Symphony. Like the opposite members of the quartet, he retains a busy schedule as a chamber and orchestral musician and educator. “However then we saved on asking ourselves, ‘Why not do that?’” Transferring ahead with such a plan would imply presenting an extended season than standard and studying a ton of difficult music in a comparatively quick time.
Axiom Quartet performs in intimate areas similar to espresso retailers, pizza locations, and Houston’s Sängerhalle.
Composed between 1939 and 1974, the quartets are crammed with harrowing dissonances in addition to moments of transcendent stillness and wonder. When taken collectively, they’re extensively acknowledged by musicologists as containing a few of the most creative and stylish writing for string quartets within the twentieth century. They’re additionally deeply autobiographical. Born in 1906 and coming of age after the Russian Revolution, Shostakovich gained worldwide fame for his symphonies and operas. His works have been subjected to censorship by Soviet authorities and sometimes overtly propagandistic. “Shostakovich lived with the fact of an oppressive political physique that was insistent upon controlling what he launched as an artist,” says Moore. “He felt huge strain to supply huge items that would attraction to the Soviets’ tastes.”
In distinction, Shostakovich employed the smaller scale of a string quartet to discover the extremes of emotion he skilled within the Stalinist Soviet Union, in addition to the post-traumatic stress of getting survived the regime when lots of his fellow artists and intellectuals had not. (In the course of the political purge within the Soviet Union within the Thirties, Shostakovich’s brother-in-law, mother-in-law, sister, and uncle have been all imprisoned.) Shostakovich’s music discovered new life in Russia’s live performance halls after Stalin died in 1953, though he continued to endure intimidation and strain from the Communist Occasion.
The parallels between life beneath Stalin and the impacts of our nation’s present political local weather on the humanities, science, and training should not misplaced on the quartet (earlier this yr, an govt order banning range, fairness, and inclusion [DEI] packages in federally funded establishments led to the sweeping cancellation of NEA grants and the intimidation and firing of workers on the John F. Kennedy Middle for the Performing Arts and the Smithsonian museums). The title of Axiom’s season, Unbroken, acknowledges this historical past and the resilience of Shostakovich and the opposite quartet composers Axiom will carry out to enrich the cycle, similar to Alan Hovhaness, George Rochberg, Elizabeth Maconchy, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and Ben Johnston.
Starting round 1760, and on as much as the current day, the string quartet—two violins, a viola, and a cello, devices which mirror the soprano, alto, tenor, and bass (SATB) voices present in choral music—has supplied composers with a balanced sonic palette for his or her most private and forward-thinking work. “It’s music for small areas,” says Carrington. “Listeners get to concentrate on the people within the ensemble.” One such venue is the intimate Houston Sängerhalle, which takes up 200 seats contained in the historic Heights Christian Church, the place Axiom will carry out the Shostakovich cycle. It’s an area they discover splendid for connecting to music and their viewers.
“We’re on the viewers’s stage, surrounded by them, and dealing with one another whereas enjoying,” says Lammers of the Sängerhalle. “We’re those enjoying the notes. However bodily and spiritually, all people within the room is a part of what’s occurring within the ensemble.” And after numerous hours of rehearsal earlier than a live performance, it’s the viewers that completes the piece. “I like looking at individuals whereas I’m enjoying,” Peters says. “There are particular moments once I can see how the music is impacting an viewers member, and that then feeds again to me and turns into this loop.”
This would be the first time the complete 15-piece Shostakovich Cycle shall be carried out in its entirety in Houston.
Onstage, the dapper musicians take turns introducing items they’re about to play to the viewers in congenial and unpretentious language. Nonetheless, they share a radical perspective towards the moribund nature of classical music efficiency. “I believe chamber music is the punk rock of classical music,” says Lammers, who at 32 is the youngest member of the quartet. “If there’s ever going to be an surroundings to show the usual live performance expertise on its head and say, ‘We’re shaking out the mud! That is going to be a totally totally different expertise than what you’d anticipate,’ it’s chamber music.”
Axiom has been “shaking out the mud” for audiences since its founding in 2014, bringing music to shocking areas, together with coffeehouses and pizza parlors, George Bush Intercontinental Airport, and underground—actually—at Cave And not using a Identify within the Texas Hill Nation. The quartet’s excursions of the state carry them into contact with small cities remoted from the chance to listen to world-class classical music performances. And audiences typically shock them. Peters remembers a gig on the resort city of South Padre Island, the place a laid-back viewers (“very Jimmy Buffett!”) welcomed Axiom to the neighborhood. On the finish of the live performance, a girl in her eighties launched herself to Peters as the previous principal piccolo participant with the Houston Symphony. On the town to go to a relative, she lived a couple of 12-hour drive away from South Padre. “You by no means know who your viewers goes to be,” he says.
Whereas Axiom traveled past Texas in its earlier incarnations, together with a 2018 tour of rural China, the quartet is completely satisfied to serve Houston as its dwelling base. However doing so nonetheless entails an amazing quantity of labor behind the scenes. “There’s plenty of sweat fairness on this enterprise,” says Moore. “It’s nearly unimaginable to pay ourselves for the precise variety of hours we spend training our devices and training collectively.” Because of a supportive board, a dedicated base of particular person donors, and the occasional grant, the quartet stays afloat, although time to rehearse stays at a premium. Carrington quotes the late, nice Leonard Bernstein, “‘To attain nice issues, two issues are wanted: a plan, and never fairly sufficient time!’”
As the primary live performance of the seven-concert season approaches on Sunday, October 5, with Quartet Nos. 1 and a pair of on this system, how does Axiom know when a bit is able to carry out?
“It’s by no means prepared. By no means,” says Moore emphatically. “As a result of, if you happen to’re a very good musician and you know the way to pay attention, there’s at all times one thing to fine-tune.”
Every live performance is a snapshot in time, offering the chance to discover and take real-time possibilities in entrance of an viewers. “You don’t need a live performance to really feel completely comfy,” says Lammers. “It must be this elastic improvisation, the place we’re type of peeking our heads round corners we’ve by no means turned earlier than, and being so properly linked, if somebody takes that nook, it’s a four-person organism that takes that threat.”
Taking dangers whereas enjoying music on the highest stage: it’s how Axiom brings that Vienna vibe to H-City.
