The Borromeo String Quartet, hailed by The Boston Globe as "simply the best" and recognized for thirty-five years as one of the most important ensembles of its time, closes Nova Linea Musica's Season 3 with Where We Converge: a program built on the long conversation between tradition and the new. The evening gathers five works that meet at the points where past and present, page and voice, intersect, anchored by the world premiere of a Nova Linea Musica commission by Grammy-nominated composer Mehmet Ali Sanlıkol.
The program opens with Shostakovich's Prelude and Fugue in B-flat Major, arranged for string quartet by Borromeo first violinist Nicholas Kitchen. The original is one of the twenty-four preludes and fugues Shostakovich completed in 1951 in homage to Bach, and Kitchen's arrangement, made in close partnership with the score, brings that homage into the quartet's voice with the kind of textual care for which the Borromeo is internationally known.
The world premiere of Mehmet Ali Sanlıkol's Nova Linea Musica commission follows. Sanlıkol, a Grammy-nominated Turkish-American composer, scholar, and performer, writes music that moves fluently between Turkish classical and folk traditions, jazz, and the Western concert tradition: a pluralist, multicultural voice praised by The Boston Globe as colorful, fanciful, and full of rhythmic life. His new work for Borromeo extends a relationship the ensemble began in 2024-25, when they premiered a Sanlıkol quartet commissioned by the Smithsonian's Freer Gallery of Art. He will be in attendance to celebrate the premiere.
Florence Price's Five Folk Songs in Counterpoint, also from 1951, sits at the heart of the program: a set of contrapuntal settings of well-known American melodies, written by a composer whose voice has only recently begun to receive the recognition it has long deserved. That Price and Shostakovich were writing within the same year, on opposite sides of the world, in such different musical languages, gives the program one of its quiet structural pleasures.
Caroline Shaw's Entr'acte, written in 2011 after the composer heard the Brentano Quartet perform Haydn's Op. 77, No. 2, takes the minuet-and-trio form as its starting point and opens it into something stranger and more luminous. The evening closes with the "Mysterium" movement from Aaron Jay Kernis's String Quartet No. 4, a work of inward, searching beauty that gathers the program's threads into a single, sustained statement.
The Borromeo String Quartet has served as ensemble-in-residence at New England Conservatory for over three decades and at the Taos School of Music since 2005. The Quartet has performed at Carnegie Hall, the Berlin Philharmonie, Wigmore Hall, Suntory Hall, the Concertgebouw, and the Shanghai Oriental Arts Center, and has collaborated with composers including Gunther Schuller, John Cage, György Ligeti, Steve Reich, Aaron Jay Kernis, Osvaldo Golijov, Jennifer Higdon, Steve Mackey, and John Harbison. They are also pioneers in the use of technology in performance: the first string quartet to use laptop computers on the concert stage, and the first classical ensemble to make their own live concert recordings and videos.
Tonight's program closes Season 3 with one of the great quartets of our time, and with a composer whose voice is helping shape what the quartet form can hold next. Where We Converge: an evening for everything a Nova Linea Musica season has been built to honor, and for everyone who has been part of building it.
