- November 15, 2025 - 2:30 PM
- The Carriage House at Wethersfield Estate & Garden
Ulysses Quartet and Oskar Espina Ruiz - Saturday Performance
In partnership with Music Mountain, Wethersfield is pleased to invite you to join us for an afternoon of breathtaking chamber music with the Ulysses Quartet and Oskar Espina Ruiz, clarinet. Due to an overwhelming response last year, we are offering two performances, one on Saturday afternoon and another one on Sunday afternoon. Buy your tickets early.
LOCATION: The Carriage House at Wethersfield Estate & Garden, 257 Pugsley Hill Road, Amenia, NY.
TIME: Reception begins at 2:30 PM. Concert begins promptly at 3:00 PM. Post-Concert Reception with the artists to follow.
PROGRAM:
Seth GROSSHANDLER Dances for String Quartet
Thomas ADÈS Alchymia for Clarinet Quintet
Felix MENDELSSOHN String Quartet in E Minor, Opus 44/2
THE ARTISTS:
The Ulysses Quartet has been praised for their “textural versatility,” “grave beauty” and “the kind of chemistry many quartets long for, but rarely achieve” (The Strad), as well as their “avid enthusiasm ... [with] chops to back up their passion” (San Diego Story), “delivered with a blend of exuberance and polished artistry” (The Buffalo News). The quartet “promise to bring as much sophistication, imagination and vitality to Beethoven’s other quartets as they will to music by a panoply of composers from long ago and today” (Gramophone).
Founded in the summer of 2015, the group won the grand prize and gold medal in the senior string division of the 2016 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition and first prize in the 2018 Schoenfeld International String Competition. In 2017, the quartet finished first in the American Prize and won second prize at the Osaka International Chamber Music Competition. They were winners of the Vietnam International Music Competition in 2019. Ulysses garnered a career development grant in the 2016 Banff International String Quartet Competition.
Music Mountain artistic director Oskar Espina Ruiz, praised by El Nuevo Día for his “masterful virtuosity,” is a “phenomenal clarinetist– a subtle and discreet virtuoso whose dynamic control matched that of the string quartet” (CVNC).
THE DISCOVERY PIECE:
Thomas Adès' Alchymia for Clarinet Quintet is a "magical and arresting piece" (The Times) written in 2021 in four movements:
A Sea-Change (...those are pearls...)
The Woods So Wild
Lachrymae
Divisions on a Lute-song: Wedekind’s Round
The composer writes:
Alchymia for Clarinet Quintet is woven from four threads leading out of the alchemical world of Elizabethan London. The movement titles refer to:
William Shakespeare, The Tempest 1611 - the king’s eyes transformed by the sea into pearls.
The Woods So Wild 1612 - Tudor popular song transformed by William Byrd into keyboard divisions (variations).
Lachrymae 1600 - (Tears) - John Dowland’s lute-song, which he transformed into viol consort Fantasias.
Divisions on a Lute-song: Wedekind’s Round - variations on the playwright Frank Wedekind’s Lautenlied (lute-song), which is played by clarinet, imitating a barrel-organ in the London street, in the final scene of Alban Berg’s opera Lulu.