Program features works by Haydn, Bartók and Carlos Simon

By Peter Alexander Nov. 19 at 10:45 a.m.

The Ivalas Quartet, the graduate quartet-in-residence at the CU College of Music, will be featured in a performance at the Museum of Boulder at 6 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 21.

The performance will take place in one of the museum’s galleries. Chairs will be set up in the gallery for the audience, with a capacity of around 40 listeners.  Tickets are available from Eventbrite and include admission to the museum. Masks are required for anyone ages two and up. 

Formed at the University of Michigan in 2016, the Ivalas Quartet came to CU in the fall of 2019 to study with the members of the Takács Quartet. Since their initial performances on campus they have changed their second violinist, but the quartet remains dedicated to the ideal of inclusion, in both repertoire and membership.

That ideal is central to the quartet’s identity as stated on their Web page: “The Ivalas Quartet was formed after a conversation about a feeling of absence we share—how we rarely saw our faces and cultures in classical music. As members of Black and Latinx communities, we saw a lack of representation, of celebration, and of classical music-making from our own communities and to our own communities.”

Their repertoire often includes works by underrepresented BIPOC composers alongside works from the standard classical canon. They have worked actively to advance their goals, working with El Sistema Colorado and presenting educational programming through Sphinx—a social justice organization that stresses the power of diversity in the arts—engaging with schools with Black and Latinx students in Detroit.

Sunday’s concert is characteristic of Ivala’s programming, featuring Haydn’s last String Quartet, op. 77 no. 2; the Third String Quartet of Bartók; and Warmth of Other Suns by African-American composer Carlos Simon. Commissioned by the Sphinx Organization, Warmth of Other Suns was inspired by Isabel Wilkerson’s book of the same title that chronicled the “Great Migration” of African Americans out of the South in the years 1916–70.

A native of Atlanta, Ga., Simon is composer-in-residence at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and recently received the Sphinx Organization’s Medal of Excellence. He has received commissions from major performing groups including the New York Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Washington National Opera and the American Composers Orchestra, among many others. 

The performance will be hosted by the Altius Collective, a project founded by former members of the Altius Quartet, a prior graduate quartet-in-residence at the CU College of Music. It is one of a planned ongoing series of chamber music concerts, both at the Museum of Boulder and in other communities in the region. 

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Ivalas Quartet

• Joseph Haydn: String Quartet op. 77 no. 2 in F major
• Carlos Simon: Warmth of Other Suns
• Béla Bartók: String Quartet No. 3

6 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 21
Museum of Boulder at Tebo Center

Tickets