Chloe Prendergast, violinist of the Butter Quartet, joins KGNU’s Iris Berkeley to discuss the quartet’s new album “Scintilla,” released in early July. Chloe, originally from Denver, formed the quartet at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. Their album features early Italian string quartets played on historical instruments. Chloe shares insights about composer Felice Giardini and the album’s selection process, highlighting the unique challenges and artistic decisions involved. The quartet has upcoming performances in the Netherlands and a North American tour kicking off in November (Interview date: 8/5/2024)
Iris Berkeley: I’m absolutely delighted to welcome Chloe Pendergrast, violinist of the Butter Quartet. into the studio live, actually here with her mother. So this is even better. This is a family affair.
Welcome. How have you been?
Chloe Prendergast: Good. It’s really nice to be here.
Iris Berkeley: You’ve brought your brand new record.
Chloe Prendergast: It’s called Scintilla. It was released just at the beginning of July.
Iris Berkeley: A brand new baby. Tell us a little bit about this album and tell us why you’re here as well. Because you have some very strong local connections.
Chloe Prendergast: Yeah, I was born and raised in Denver, grew up here, and then I moved to do my master’s degree at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague in Historical String Performance in Baroque violin. While there, I formed a string quartet with three other people from the conservatory and we became the Butter Quartet. It started as a school class that we needed to do. And then it turned into a real string quartet. Here we are. This is our first record that we’ve put out into the world.
Iris Berkeley: That’s fantastic. So you are joined by violinist Anna Jane Lester, violist Isabel Franenberg, and cellist Evan Buttar? Is that where the name came from?
Chloe Prendergast: Evan Butter, yeah. His name is spelled with an A at the end but the historical spelling of his name is with an E as in the food. So we were like, we obviously need that as our name.
Iris Berkeley: That’s fantastic. And where are you all from?
Chloe Prendergast: I’m from Denver. Anna is from Jacksonville, Florida. Isabel grew up in the Netherlands but has an American father. Evan grew up in Vancouver, Canada. We all moved to study at the Conservatory of The Hague.
Iris Berkeley: Oh, wow. That is fantastic. And it was a school project that turned into a thing. Brilliant. So tell us about the record.
Chloe Prendergast: This is a record of very early Italian string quartets. We play on gut strings, we’re a historical string quartet, so we try to go back to the roots of the genre. We play a lot of Haydn, and we were like, everyone thinks of Haydn as the father of the string quartet, and what was the context around that?
We had one person just say oh, do you just play Austrian music from this time? We were like, oh, actually, I guess we sometimes do. So we were like, what was happening in Italy? We went and did a bunch of research into old manuscripts, first editions. Found some pieces that we read through. And we’re like, wow, these are cool and don’t seem to have been recorded.
Iris Berkeley: Looking at this, there’s four quartets on this album, and Boccherini’s Second String Quartet was the only one that I knew of. I had to take to Wikipedia to learn about Felice Giardini, who’s the composer of what we’re gonna hear tonight.
Chloe Prendergast: Yeah.
Iris Berkeley: Give us a little background.
Chloe Prendergast: Felice Giardini was born in Italy but spent the most of his career in London. He was good friends with the Prince of Wales. They were buddies. They would have string quartet parties together where Giardini played the first violin part and the Prince of Wales played the cello part. We think Giardini must’ve had an incredible violist because all of the viola writing is really beautiful, really phenomenal, often very high or really intricate for viola writing at the time.
Iris Berkeley: That’s a good theory because his dates: 1716 to 1796. I believe he was a child prodigy!
Chloe Prendergast: Yeah, I think he was! Along with Pugnani who is also on this record. There were three violinists. Maddalena Lombardini Sirmen, Giardini, and Pugnani were all violinists and Boccherini was a cellist. And I think all of them were prodigies on their instruments.
Iris Berkeley: And I’m sure you can see that in the writing as well.
Chloe Prendergast: Yeah, and it makes for some very interesting writing because the genre hadn’t been really codified yet. So it was a lot of experimenting with, what happens here? And what happens if we try this?
Iris Berkeley: Because there’s a quartet on here that’s two movements. This is all early stage, early days.
Chloe Prendergast: Yeah, exactly. There was not a specific order of movements that you had to have with the slow, fast, slow, fast or whatever.
Iris Berkeley: So it sounds like there’s been a little bit of forensics and anthropology in this project as well. A lot of history in choosing. How do you choose what goes on an album like this?
Chloe Prendergast: We did a lot of reading and looking through manuscripts and things to see what was really happening in the very early days of the string quartets. Three of these quartets come from the 1760s. Then we played through a lot of old first editions and were like, what sounds good? What do we like? And we like playing off of the first editions because then you don’t know what’s in somebody else’s part. Most of the time scores didn’t exist back then, so you didn’t really know. So then you have the information only from what you’re seeing in your part, which is what people would have done back then. Then you’re like, wait, why are you playing so loudly? And they’re like, I have a forte here. And you’re like, whoa, I have a piano. We’re like, whoa, I think these notes are wrong. Then you have to go in and be like, is this on purpose?
Iris Berkeley: For the piece that we’re going to hear, this the first time it’s ever been recorded. You get to make that artistic decision. What’s that feel like?
Chloe Prendergast: Yeah, it’s really cool. This piece in particular, the tempo markings didn’t totally make sense to us. I think they’re called andante and then another, which is the first movement. And you’re like, that can’t be, it’s not supposed to be slow. We played it really slowly at first and we’re like, that doesn’t make any sense. You have to do a lot of- what’s the emotional content of this piece? And how do we bring that across? What makes sense? A lot of just figuring it out.
Iris Berkeley: That sounds so fascinating. You’ve got a niche here because you’re playing on gut strings. You’re playing music that a lot of people haven’t heard. This is interesting because you’re a string quartet and there’s so many string quartets. How do you find your space?
Chloe Prendergast: You’re right, there’s not a lot of historical string quartets out there. Playing historical instruments is a little bit of a niche in and of itself. The string quartet genre is pretty challenging. To become a string quartet that doesn’t sound horrible actuallytakes a really long time. Finding people you like working with also takes a long time and can be hard. So we have found there aren’t a lot of historical string quartets just because of the nature of the genre.
I think more and more now are coming into being, but it’s a newer thing. I think we’ve just been following the music of what seems interesting. What haven’t we heard before? What do we feel like we can say in a different way than what has been said? If we hear something and we’re like, we don’t have anything to add to that, then probably we’re not as likely to play it. We do play contemporary music also for gut strings and bridging those gaps.
Iris Berkeley: Will we be expecting a recording of modern music on gut strings? Because I would be all over that.
Chloe Prendergast: Yeah, I’m sure it’ll happen. We just played a concert for this really cool outdoor festival in the Netherlands called Wonderfeel with some Caroline Shaw in it and this piece by this really cool composer, Chris Dirksen from Canada written for friends of ours on gut strings called “White Man’s Cattle”. So we try to do things that sort of cover that expanse and relate what’s happening now to what happened back then.
Iris Berkeley: On that note, because you’ve just released this album, was that sort of your first big recording experience?
Chloe Prendergast: It was my first recording experience where I was so in charge of the editing, I would say. I also play in this group, Holland Baroque, which is an incredible ensemble in the Netherlands. I recorded quite a few CDs with them before, but I wasn’t a huge part of the editing process.
Iris Berkeley: So having that sort of artistic direction, you want to do more of it?
Chloe Prendergast: Yeah, I do. It was really interesting. I think it makes all of us better. It’s really confronting. You’re like, wow, I didn’t know I sounded like that. But it’s really cool. I’m hoping we get to do more of it. We’re working on trying to figure out the plans of what goes on the next album.
Iris Berkeley: Nice. And you’re actually headed, I was gonna say back home, but then if you’re from here what is home?
Chloe Prendergast: Yeah, great question. I don’t know. That’s home. This is home.
Iris Berkeley: Headed back to another home tomorrow? Cause you all have some concerts up on the horizon.
Chloe Prendergast: Yeah, we have some concerts for a festival somewhere in the Netherlands up north. Some Mendelssohn. It should be really nice. We have our first North American tour coming up in November. It’s the first half of November, I think.
Iris Berkeley: Where will you be?
Chloe Prendergast: Sadly not in Colorado this time. We start in Ann Arbor and then Toronto and Seattle and the Vancouver area.
Iris Berkeley: Oh, that’ll be fun. So how can folks learn more about y’all?
Chloe Prendergast: They can find us on our website: butterquartet.com. We have Instagram: Butter Quartet. Facebook: Butter Quartet.
Iris Berkeley: You picked a good name. Was that a consideration?
Chloe Prendergast: It actually started as a joke in our first rehearsal ever where our violist was like, haha, Butter Quartet. It’s obviously the best of our last names. We were like, haha, and our cellist was like, please don’t use that name. That’s a horrible idea. But it stuck, because It was a good name.
Iris Berkeley: It is a good name. Okay. So we will play Felice Giardini’s String Quartet, Opus 25, No. 1 in C. What should folks listen to?
Chloe Prendergast: Ooh. There’s a lot of really exciting, interesting emotional changes in this music. It starts with a big huge celebratory- we really thought about fireworks and celebration. Some virtuosity in the first violin for sure. The second movement is really sweet and really lovely. And then there’s some very hilarious things in the third movement that you would not expect. We think he was having a whole lot of fun with that last movement.
Iris Berkeley: With his buddy, the virtuoso violist. Was there anything else that you want the folks in our KGNUniverse, as we colloquially call it, to know?
Chloe Prendergast: I like that. I don’t think so, but would love to hear from all of you.
Iris Berkeley: Yeah, fantastic. Up next, Felice Giardini, String Quartet, Op. 25, No. 1 in C, here on a classic Monday on KGNU.
