World-class quartet coming to hamlet

By Steve Israel
Middletown Times Herald-Record
July 3, 2003

Why is a chamber music group The New Yorker calls "the brainiest of the hot young American string quartets" playing a church near a creek in the western Sullivan County hamlet of Hortonville?

Let's ask the woman who presents Saturday's Brentano String Quartet concert.

"We've always had musicians of this caliber," says Judith Pearce of Lake Huntington, stating the obvious for those in the classical music know.

Fact is, Pearce is a major figure in the chamber music world. The musicians she presents in her annual Weekend of Chamber Music series are her friends.

She teaches flute at Princeton University, where she chairs the concert committee. The Brentano String Quartet was Princeton's first quartet-in-residence.

Pearce also draws on her classical music friends from England, where she grew up in the Sussex countryside. That's where she was the 19-year-old flutist for the Nash Ensemble. And that's why Pearce and the Brentano Quartet will be performing a piece by one of her English colleagues, composer Nicholas Maw, along with selections from Bach's "The Art of the Fugue."

So when Pearce came to America in 1986, it made sense she would invite her friends to perform near her country home in Lake Huntington.

The first spot was an unlikely room – the old Lake Huntington meat market.

"Informal, and the American word would be funky," she says with typical understatement in her British accent.

Since then, Pearce has presented top chamber musicians in the Tusten Theatre in Narrowsburg, the Nutshell Inn in Lake Huntington and now in that old white church in Hortonville.

So really, for Judith Pearce, the answer to why one of the world's top string quartets is playing Hortonville is simple.

"It's all based on colleagues and friends," she says. "All of us share a love of chamber music."

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