Lyrica Chamber Music hosts the Formosa Quartet

The Formosa String Quartet likes to take the expected and turn it into the remarkable. It invites the audience to hear “the unheard, the underrepresented, and the next.”

The ensemble will bring its innovative music-making to Lyrica Chamber Music’s April 27 season-ending concert at 3 p.m. at the Presbyterian Church of Chatham Township, 240 Southern Blvd.

Lyrica concerts are presented with the support of Morris Arts which seeks to build community through the arts.

The Formosa will play Schubert’s Rosamunde String Quartet and will be joined by Lyrica’s co-artistic director, pianist David Kaplan, for Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet. In between will be the ensemble’s unique Quartet Set.

The quartet’s original members all came from Taiwan, formerly called Formosa, and built much of its repertoire around the island’s indigenous music. Since then, its players have changed around founding-member violinist David Bernat.

The quartet now consists of violinists Bernat and Jasmine Lin, violist Matthew Cohen, and cellist Deborah Pae.

Replying to questions as a group, the quartet said, “Over the years the quartet’s identity has evolved. Through crucial junctures of self-reevaluation in its journey, the quartet now strongly holds itself to the task of reexamining its assumptions, preconceptions, and ‘boxes.’”

The founding members’ interest in championing Taiwanese music and indigenous cultures has since expanded to include the exploration of the rich folk traditions and heritages found in America today.

Winners of the First Prize and Amadeus Prize at the Wigmore Hall International String Quartet Competition, the Formosa Quartet has been hailed as “spellbinding” (The Strad) and “remarkably fine” (Gramophone), and has given critically acclaimed performances at the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, the Da Camera Society of Los Angeles, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center, the National Concert Hall in Taipei, Wigmore Hall in London, die Glocke Bremen, and the Kammermusiksaal at the Berliner Philharmonie.

The centerpiece of Sunday’s concert will be the epic Shostakovich Piano Quintet, a five-movement work that has its antecedents in the piano quintets of Schumann and Brahms.

“Shostakovich's Piano Quintet is perhaps the quintessential work of this genre in the 20th century,” say the members of the quartet. “It is a titanic masterpiece spanning the gamut of human emotions from ardent declarations of passion to ghostly whispers from beyond, with moments of greatest tenderness and grotesque depictions of humanity's darkest impulses.”

Schubert’s quartet draws its name from a theme borrowed from the composer’s incidental music for the play “Rosamunde.”

“As with any of Schubert’s late works, he is writing as a man aware that he is already looking back on the near entirety of his life. Nostalgia, and sometimes grief or anger about a lost past, is conveyed explicitly through the quotation of multiple of his early lieder and incidental music.

“Although the Rosamunde theme only appears in the second movement, its expression pervades the entire work. The story of Rosamunde centers around the reclaiming of a throne. The idea of recapturing a more perfect time (perhaps childhood, represented by this comforting Rosamunde theme) is at the heart of the quartet narrative.”

The two major works will be separated by the Formosa Quartet Set, where just about anything goes. Original compositions, folk, pop, jazz, poetry arrangements, and curiosities from across the repertoire are all fair game.

“These pieces are announced from the stage, so you never know what you’re going to get! You might find yourself hearing something rather familiar, only to be followed by music you never imagined existed for string quartet. The element of delight, wonder, and discovery is integral to the spirit of a set.”

Kaplan was a performer on a Grammy-nominated recording, Valerie Coleman’s “Revelry.” It was nominated in the category of Best Contemporary Classical Composition.

Kaplan has been called “excellent and adventurous” by The New York Times, and praised by the Boston Globe for “grace and fire” at the keyboard. As orchestra soloist, he has appeared with the Britten Sinfonia at London’s Barbican and Das Sinfonie Orchester Berlin at the Philharmonie, as well the Symphony Orchestras of Hawaii and San Antonio. As recitalist, he has performed at the Ravinia Festival, Sarasota Opera House, Music on Main in Vancouver, Strathmore, Washington’s National Gallery, and New York’s Carnegie and Merkin Halls.

Tickets for Lyrica concerts are $30 ($25 for seniors), and students and children are admitted free. For more information about Lyrica Chamber Music, visit www.lyricachambermusic.com or call 973-309-1668.