Verona Quartet to tell musical stories – JH News&Guide

In 1928 the French composer Maurice Ravel, at the age of 53, went on a four-month tour of the United States to perform and present his work. Historic highlights of his trip included meeting George Gershwin and traveling up to Harlem in New York City to hear Duke Ellington and his band perform at the Cotton Club.

“He was so inspired, he started to draw from that jazz style. … incorporated that into his writing,” Abigail Rojansky, violist for the Verona Quartet, said last week, speaking form California the day before embarking on a weeklong trip to Hong Kong.

One can hear the influence in his later work, such as his second violin sonata, the second movement of which is titled “Blues.” But even before that one can detect his searching interest in new tonalities, as in his String Quartet. “You can hear that he wants to explore these harmonies that are so evocative of jazz.”

This collision of European classical music and American popular music has proven endlessly fascinating to musicians and audiences, including the members of the Verona Quartet — Rojansky, violinists Jonathan Ong and Dorothy Ro, and cellist Jonathan Dormand — which the Grand Teton Music Festival will host to present its 1920s-themed program “Stomp” at 4 p.m. Sunday in the Center Theater.

In addition to Ravel’s String Quartet and an arrangement of Ellington’s “Cotton Club Stomp,” works by Gershwin and Shostakovich are on the program, along with a virtuosic version of the Vincent Youmans chestnut “Tea for Two.”

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