Quogue Chamber Music Welcomes Galvin Cello Quartet

The award-winning Galvin Cello Quartet will open Quogue Chamber Music’s 2023 season on June 17, at Quogue Community Hall. The quartet is made up of cellists from China, Brazil, South Korea, and the United States and got its breakout moment when it won the silver medal at the 2021 Fischoff Competition, and subsequently the 2022 Victor Elmaleh Competition.

The setlist for the Quogue concert includes pieces by Mozart, J.S. Bach, Rossini, Fitzenhagen, Piazzolla, Gardel, Gershwin and Popper. Members of the Concert Artists Guild, the quartet consists of cellists Sihao He, Sydney Lee, Haddon Kay, and Luiz Fernando Venturelli, who all met as students during their time at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music. The four musicians launched the quartet during the pandemic.

“I’m originally from the New York, New Jersey area, and so I feel like I’m coming back home essentially,” Lee said. “We’re really looking forward to coming and performing our program. We have a whole variety of works that we’re really excited to perform.”

Lee explained that the quartet was born around January 2021 when the tight-knit group of students, who were always hanging out in Northwestern’s cello studio and were seeing only each other due to the COVID-19 restrictions, decided they wanted to perform together in their spare time.

When Lee approached the school’s chamber director about the idea of formation of the quartet, the director said she would only allow it if they entered the Fischoff Competition. But this was in February, and the Fischoff deadline was at the beginning of March. Venturelli was still in Brazil at the time, so the other three members of the quartet practiced at Northwestern while awaiting his return. After he arrived in Evanston and followed the quarantine protocols, the musicians were left with just 11 days to put together 40 minutes of repertoire before their silver medal-winning performance.

After succeeding at the competition, the quartet decided to stay together. The Concert Artists Guild has booked gigs for Galvin Cello Quartet throughout the summer at the Ascent International Cello Festival at the University of Cincinnati, College-Conservatory of Music, with additional performances scheduled throughout the country in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Kentucky and Colorado.

“We decided to take this group even more seriously and really just pursue it since we all really genuinely love playing together,” said Lee.

As opposed to a full orchestra, cello quartets are unusual, explained Jane Deckoff, Quogue Chamber Music’s president. She was first introduced to the concept when, as an oboe player, she went to a chamber music summer program in Bennington, Vermont. The atmosphere there was fun, she said, with musicians being coached to improve their craft. It was there that she met Maxine Neuman, a “very fine cellist,” who was on the Bennington faculty and whose career took her around the world, and won her three Grammys, before her death from cancer this past December. Neuman, said Deckoff, would make a point to bring all of the cello players together to play in the evenings. It was the first time she heard cellos playing together.

“It’s a beautiful and a very rich and glorious sound,” she said.

It’s the quartet itself that makes Galvin unique. Lee explained that because each member of the quartet is playing the same instrument, it gives them more responsibility.

“Whoever is first or second cello in certain pieces many times takes a lot of the solo parts, but actually more recently, we’ve been trying to divide more evenly,” she said. “It is very unique, because each of us have to be soloists. We can’t just rely on one person to do all the solo parts. We really get to show each of our personalities as a player because we’re all very different.”

Another unique aspect is the fact that the quartet performs without music in front of them.

“It makes it, I think, a lot more heartfelt in the sense that it’s not like half of our brain is focused on looking at music and the second half of our brain is interacting with each other,” Lee said. “We can fully interact with each other and enjoy playing when we don’t have music.”

Deckoff takes who she brings in to perform for this series seriously, she said. And after having heard the Galvin Cello Quartet, had no doubts about asking them to come perform in Quogue.

“I don’t bring anybody in who I haven’t heard,” she said. “I know they’re good, or at least I feel that way.”

As an organization, Quogue Chamber Music was founded in 2009 to fill a void in chamber music offerings in the region. For Deckoff, planning and executing these concerts has been a rewarding experience.

“It’s been very satisfying,” she said. “Partly the satisfaction comes from the fact that everybody’s so supportive. They attend the concerts. They send checks to help us out. They’re there for us.”

Galvin Cello Quartet performs at Quogue Community Hall, 125 Jessup Avenue, Quogue, at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, June 17. Tickets are $50 ($5 students). A $110 ticket includes a post-concert reception, giving the public a chance to meet the artists. Tickets available at quoguechambermusic.org and will also be sold at the door.