Woodward String Quartet

By: Sarah Smarch

Four principal strings from the DSO have joined forces to form the Woodward String Quartet, bringing their signature chemistry and incisive playing to chamber music. Concertmaster Robyn Bollinger, Associate Concertmaster Kimberly Kaloyanides Kennedy, Principal Viola Eric Nowlin, and Principal Cello Wei Yu make their official Detroit debut as a quartet in The Cube on Thursday, November 14. Ahead of their debut, we sat down with them to learn more about the project. 

“We consider The Cube to be a large chamber,” says Eric, from his chair in the Peter D. and Julie F. Cummings Cube, the DSO’s black box theater. “Chamber music was originally played in people's homes. It was played in coffee houses, salons, this sort of thing. And it was meant to be a bit more intimate in terms of the setting, but also in terms of what's happening musically. I think when you watch chamber music, you really get an inside look at how music gets made between four people. You may hear the voices a little bit easier. And you can see four people communicate without having someone direct. You get to see people interact person to person without an interface.”

When asked why they formed the quartet, the answer comes with no hesitation: we like playing together. Four words, simple on their own, but which speak to much more.  

“I think you'll find, with just a few exceptions, that it's rare for an orchestra to have four principals who want to play together. It can be really challenging to find four people who all have a similar objective and a similar love for chamber,” says Eric. Kim adds, “There's a chemistry, there's a musical value that we all celebrate, and we all feel it. We celebrate those qualities in each other, and to be able to perform and rehearse together and just lean on in and go to those special places, it's really fun.” 

The four first played together during Robyn’s concertmaster trial week in 2022; a year later they played for a private audience with Jader and that week’s DSO guest, violinist Gil Shaham, in attendance.  

“The first time people in the orchestra heard us, people kept coming up and saying, ‘It's like you guys have been together for years, you should record.’ And then fast forward to that donor event, with Jader and Gil Shaham, and they're so excited! Jader was emotional: ‘You guys have to record.’ That just kind of stuck with us. And it motivated us to have the courage to go for it.” 

“And there is a chamber music history in the DSO, going back to Gordon Staples and Misha Mishakov before. Mishakov had the Mishakov Quartet and Gordon Staples was at the time his stand partner. So sort of our thing,” says Robyn, gesturing to her stand partner Kim. “There's tons of chamber musicians who are from Detroit, who have since gone on to great careers elsewhere. The Kavafian sisters are from here. Joey Silverstein, who was concertmaster in Boston for a long time, was a great chamber musician. So many of the leaders in the chamber music world are from Detroit.”

Detroit is the fabric that wove them together. The group’s first public performance was for last June’s historic opening of Michigan Central Station, when they were asked to record a special tribute for J Dilla, one of the most influential producers in Detroit hip hop history, as part of the opening night program. “I love that our first public appearance together was when we played for the Michigan Central opening. We’re incredibly proud of that,” says Wei. 

“When we were thinking about our name, we wanted to incorporate this town, our hometown, and the significance of the DSO as the reason we know each other,” says Kim. “Woodward is the iconic street of Detroit,” says Eric, “kind of like Broadway is to New York. A lot of people will know that reference and know we have a connection to the city. Orchestra Hall is on Woodward as well…so that’s kind of important,” he says with a wink in his voice. 

The skill and communication quartet playing calls for enhances the members’ abilities when back on stage with the full orchestra, where principals are leading their sections. “Playing in an orchestra is like a giant chamber music ensemble,” explains Eric, “but with anywhere from 85 to 100 people, somebody has to kind of corral all those musical ideas and personalities and fuse them into one whole. And that's the conductor's role. But at the same time, for us to really feel like we have good communication in the front—what they call the horseshoe—that communication is enhanced through the experience of playing together without a conductor. It counterintuitively makes us better at playing together with the conductor, because we know each other's timing. We know each other's musical instincts; we know each other's general sound and how we cue: the things we're locked into when playing chamber. That makes the job of the conductor easier. And sometimes the conductor can focus on something else instead of needing to micromanage what's going on in the screen section.” 

How else is playing chamber music different for the musicians in the ensemble? The immediacy of their responses exercises muscles on an even finer level.

Robyn talks about how study of chamber music reveals additional depth and insight into the composers themselves, “We're playing this Debussy quartet and it's so wonderful to think about something like La Mer, Debussy's iconic piece for orchestra, and see how Debussy uses musical language and the similarities and differences--how he creates those same colors with just four instruments. The virtuosity of the composer in quartet writing is so extreme. And for a lot of composers, quartets are the centerpiece of their repertoire. The stuff that they were most excited about writing were symphonies and string quartets. For Beethoven. For Brahms. For Bartók: string quartets and the Concerto for Orchestra. Historically, a composer's most significant output was that pairing.”  

That recording that Jader suggested: they’ve already tackled it. Over the course of two days in August, the quartet took to Orchestra Hall’s stage, adding their sound to the long legacy of DSO recordings captured within the lauded acoustics of Detroit’s musical home. “It was an opportunity for us to not only to get to know each other in a recording setting, but also to have music out there that's accessible by anyone who wants to listen, whether that's an audience member, whether that's a music fan, a presenter, a manager, whoever it is who would like to find us and hear us play.” 

“Recording as a quartet was a serious undertaking,” says Robyn, “The microphone is like a microscope and every single thing, for better or worse, is picked up. In some ways performing live is more comfortable. It's a more forgiving medium, because there is the opportunity to get swept up in the moment in a way that in recording there isn’t. There's no one to play for. It's a much more sparse atmosphere. I learned a lot and I think we're all really proud of the work we did. It's going to be a good recording.”  

On November 14, the Woodward String Quartet presents a program inspired by the East. “Eastward View,” first pays homage to the quartet’s name (Orchestra Hall’s Woodward façade faces east) and opens with Haydn’s Sunrise Quartet. Robyn explains, “This is important because Haydn is considered the founding father of quartets; he’s credited with inventing the genre of string quartets. We’re also excited to highlight a living, Michigan composer, with Zhou Tian’s String Quartet No. 1, written as his last work before he moved from China.” Zhou has a strong DSO connection: his wife Mingzhao Zhou is a member of the violin section.  

“We close the program with Debussy’s String Quartet. Debussy was tremendously influenced by the Far East. In the second movement of the quartet Debussy references gamelan, a Javanese instrument, which is a sort of percussion instrument, and he imitates the texture with pizzicato; it’s a very special color. This is the heart of the program.”  

Audiences of DSO chamber performances can expect to hear from the musicians on the stage who will introduce each work, bringing you close to the compositions you are experiencing with their own words. There’s a good chance you’ll also laugh: “Eric will do stand up,” says Robyn jokingly.  

“I’ll just do an hour and a half of viola jokes,” he chimes in. “And then we’ll take a bow,” Robyn laughs. These moments draw you inside the music and solidify the intimacy felt when music is shared in chambers.