Arditti Quartet to perform newer work by UB’s Felder

The renowned Arditti Quartet will return to UB on March 31 for a concert that features newer work by UB faculty member David Felder.

The performance, presented by the Department of Music in conjunction with The Robert & Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music, will take place at 7:30 p.m. in Lippes Concert Hall in Slee Hall, North Campus.

This concert has been rescheduled from its original date of March 30. Patrons holding tickets for March 30 will be able to use them on March 31.

Those not holding tickets may purchase them at a cost of $15 for the general public and $10 for UB faculty/staff/alumni, seniors and non-UB students. UB students are free with ID. Tickets are available in advance at the Center for the Arts box office, online at Tickets.com and one hour before concert time at the Slee Hall box office.

The program features “Netivot,” an extended string quartet composed for the Arditti and the JACK Quartet by UB composer David Felder, SUNY Distinguished Professor and Birge-Cary Professor of Music, along with the premiere of a video component by former UB faculty member Elliot Caplan.

The Arditti — Irvine Arditti and Ashot Sarkissjan, violin; Ralf Ehlers, viola; and Lucas Fels, cello — also will perform Hilda Paredes’ “Bitácora capilar” and Harrison Birtwistle’s “The Silk House Sequences.”

Dubbed “The world’s pre-eminent contemporary music quartet” by The Guardian, the Arditti Quartet enjoys a world-wide reputation for its spirited and technically refined interpretations of contemporary and earlier 20th-century music.

Many hundreds of string quartets and other chamber works have been written for the ensemble since its founding by first violinist Irvine Arditti in 1974. Many of these works have left a permanent mark on 20th-century repertoire and have given the Arditti Quartet a firm place in music history.

The world premieres of quartets by such composers such as Abrahamsen, Cage, Carter, Stockhausen and Xenakis show the wide range of music in the quartet’s repertoire.

Ensemble members believe close collaboration with composers is vital to the process of interpreting modern music, so they try to work with every composer whose music they play. They also are committed to educational work, as shown by the master classes and workshops for young performers and composers they hold all over the world.

Over the past 30 years, the quartet has received many prizes for its work, among them the Deutsche Schallplatten Preis — several times — and the Gramophone Award for the best recording of contemporary music in 1999 (that of Elliott Carter) and in 2002 (the work of Harrison Birtwistle).

In 2004, it received the “Coup de Coeur” prize by the Academie Charles Cros in France for its exceptional contribution to the dissemination of contemporary music, and was awarded the prestigious Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 1999 for “lifetime achievement” in music, the only ensemble ever to receive it.