Korff School faculty ensemble Una Corda performs Feb. 15
calendar icon10 Feb 2022
Lincoln, Neb.--Una Corda, translated as “one string” and/or “one voice,” will perform Tuesday, Feb. 15 at 7:30 p.m. in Westbrook Music Building Rm. 119.
The concert is free and open to the public. It will also be live webcast. Visit https://music.unl.edu/webcasts the day of the performance for the link.
Una Corda is comprised of five faculty members from the Glenn Korff School of Music: David Neely, violin; Clark Potter, viola; Karen Becker, cello; Hans Sturm, double bass; and Mark Clinton, piano. They formed a new resident faculty string quartet to share their love of chamber music with the community.
Members of the quintet have performed on five continents, including performances for the American String Teacher’s Association, the College Music Society, the International Society of Bassists and the American Viola Society.
The members of Una Corda have recorded for Albany Records, Centaur, Elan, Musical Arts and EMI. All of them have also performed together in some capacity.
“The bottom line is that we all love playing chamber music,” Potter said. “We will definitely enjoy doing this together—these are my friends as much as my wonderful co-workers. The beautiful thing about an ensemble like this is that not only is there a terrific piano quintet repertoire that would use all five of us, but we can split up and perform music for a whole host of other combinations—piano quartets, piano trios, string trios, duos for each combination, etc.”
For their Feb. 15 program, Una Corda will perform two pieces: Tyler Goodrich White’s “Divertimentoscuro,” which was composed in 2001, and the classic “Trout Quintet” by Franz Schubert. Both pieces are composed for the quintet’s instrumentation: piano, violin, viola, cello and double bass.
Potter said one other shared similarity between the two pieces is the use of variation movement.
“In the case of Schubert, he borrowed a melody from himself, the famous song ‘Die Forelle’ (The Trout) for voice and piano and made that theme the basis for a set of variations where each member of the ensemble gets to play the theme with varying accompaniments underneath,” Potter said.
In the case of “Divertimentoscuro,” the second of two movements is marked “Fantasy Variations on a theme of Shakespeare.”
“Shakespeare, a composer?” Potter said. “Not exactly, or at least not that we know. But Shakespeare did allude to a melody in ‘Love’s Labor’s Lost,’ when the character Holofernes the Pedant rattles off the following solfege syllables of the scale: ‘Ut, Re, Sol, La, Mi, Fa’ (or C, D, G, A, E and F). That little melody formed the basis of the notes of the piece.”
Potter said the ensemble is eager to play together in this concert.
“As far as the name, Una Corda, we like the element of unity that the name brings,” he said. “We are looking forward to getting started.”