Video: Miró Quartet Releases New Music Video 'Over The Rainbow'

The Miró Quartet today released a new music video celebrating its hometown of Austin, Texas, shot at iconic sites across the city and set to an arrangement of Harold Arlen's Over the Rainbow from their forthcoming album Home, out Friday, May 10, 2024 on PENTATONE. The album's closing track, Harold Arlen's iconic movie tune Over the Rainbow (arr. William Ryden) from The Wizard of Oz is a soaring message of hopefulness encouraging listeners to never stop dreaming.

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Celebrating 30 years as an ensemble in 2025, the GRAMMY-nominated Texas-based quartet explores the many meanings of "home" through works by four Pulitzer Prize-winning American composers, including two new commissions by Kevin Puts and Caroline Shaw paired with works by George Walker and Samuel Barber. Two new singles are available to stream now, including the "Molto adagio" from George Walker's String Quartet No. 1 and Over the Rainbow.

Miró Quartet shares, "This album is the culmination of a long and creative process of discovery, exploring our relationships with living composers as well as exploring and recording the existing core repertoire of American string quartet music. It has been an exciting musical journey that ultimately has brought us home as musicians in a new and special way. To us, Home represents stability and safety, yet human life is a journey of constant change, acquisition and loss. We travel away from our origins, and hopefully onwards towards our goals, our vision of true home. And as much as needing and having a home is a universal experience, leaving a home and starting life's journey out on one's own is also a pivotal moment of growth for every one of us.

"Kevin Puts and Caroline Shaw are friends whom we know well and are both valued parts of our personal and artistic lives, and the string quartets they wrote for us certainly feel like 'hobme' to us: their sound worlds are a familiar and beloved musical space that we feel comfortable inhabiting, a sonic structure that reflects the concerns and values that we four as people care and worry about, both as we make music together and as we go about our lives in this challenging home world that we all share."

The opening and title work Home (2019), the third work that Kevin Puts (b. 1972) has written for Miró Quartet, was nominated as an arrangement for quartet and chorus for a 2024 GRAMMY Award for Best Choral Performance. Inspired by the plight of Syrian refugees fleeing to Europe, Puts uses the structural elements of the piece to depict this experience of displacement. The comfortable key of C Major is used by the composer as a pleasant and idyllic representation of home - which is abandoned after the work's first several minutes in search of new and unfamiliar harmonic terrain.

While the quartet has toured internationally for three decades, the United States has been Miró's physical and cultural home for nearly 30 years. In this album, they capture great American works such as the Barber Adagio - part of the musical fabric of their lives since their earliest playing days - alongside less familiar American works, such as the second movement of George Walker's first string quartet (Molto adagio), that have been incorporated into their repertoire more recently, representing the powerful but sometimes unacknowledged threads that often run deeply through our concept of "home." The album also features Barber's String Quartet in B minor, Op. 11, containing the famously stirring American concert staple "Adagio for Strings."

Caroline Shaw's Microfictions [volume 1], written in collaboration with the Miró Quartet by teleconference during the pandemic lockdowns, is a set of six miniature musical stories inspired by the paintings of the quartet's artist namesake, Joan Miró, and the short science fiction of T.R. Darling - the original "microfictions" referenced by the title. As the composer shares: "Each movement is brief but vivid, with a distinct sonic profile... one's interpretation of the stories and of the music can be varied-there is no one right way to connect the sounds or images or ideas. Rather I hope that the words create an environment for curious listening, and an invitation to imagination." The Quartet premiered Microfictions at Shriver Hall Concert Series in Baltimore in 2021. At only 30, Shaw became the youngest ever recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2013.

Home is Miró Quartet's second album on PENTATONE, following the quartet's recording of Beethoven's Complete String Quartets. Having independently released many celebrated recordings for a variety of global labels, Miró was nominated for a 2024 GRAMMY Award for Best Choral Performance for House of Belonging, created in collaboration with Austin-based choral group Conspirare.

About Miró Quartet

The Miró Quartet is one of America's most celebrated and dedicated string quartets, having been labeled by The New Yorker as "furiously committed" and noted by the Cleveland Plain Dealer for its "exceptional tonal focus and interpretive intensity." For nearly 30 years, the GRAMMY-nominated Quartet has performed throughout the world on the most prestigious concert stages, earning accolades from critics and audiences alike. Based in Austin, TX, and thriving on the area's storied music scene, the Miró takes pride in finding new ways to communicate with audiences of all backgrounds while cultivating the longstanding tradition of chamber music.

Miró Quartet's recent and upcoming projects include a touring and recording project with pianist Lara Downes titled Here on Earth, featuring musical depictions of our planet, its evolution, and the lives of its inhabitants; the premiere of a new version of Kevin Puts' Credo with the Naples Philharmonic; and collaborations with composers Steven Banks, Tamar-Kali, and Gabriel Kahane, as well as soprano Karen Slack. The Miró recently produced an Emmy Award-winning audiovisual multimedia project titled Transcendence, a documentary centered around a performance of Franz Schubert's Quartet in G Major on rare Stradivarius instruments, available on live stream, CD, and Blu-ray.

Formed in 1995, the Miró Quartet was awarded first prize at several national and international competitions including the Banff International String Quartet Competition and the Naumburg Chamber Music Competition. Deeply committed to music education, members of the Quartet have given master classes at universities and conservatories throughout the world, and since 2003 the Miró has served as the quartet-in-residence at the University of Texas at Austin Sarah and Ernest Butler School of Music. In 2005, the Quartet became the first ensemble ever to be awarded the coveted Avery Fisher Career Grant.

The Miró Quartet took its name and its inspiration from the Spanish artist Joan Miró, whose Surrealist works - with subject matter drawn from the realm of memory, dreams, and imaginative fantasy - are some of the most groundbreaking, influential, and admired of the 20th century. Learn more at https://miroquartet.com/.

Home Tracklist

Kevin Puts (b. 1972) - Home
1. Warm, with rubato [6:02]
2. Faster, refreshed [3:38]
3. Dangerously fast [7:16]

4. George Walker (1922-2018) - II. Molto adagio from Quartet No. 1 [6:28]

Caroline Shaw (b. 1982) - Microfictions [volume 1]
5. I. Under the hot sun... [3:06]
6. II. The photographs smeared... [3:56]
7. III. The summer storm laughed... [3:06]
8. III & 1/2. Between the third and fourth... [0:16]
9. IV. The complete taxonomy... [3:12]
10. V. Waking up on the early side... [1:47]
11. VI. The mountains folded in... [3:20]

Samuel Barber (1910-1981) - String Quartet in B minor, Op. 11
12. I. Molto allegro e appassionato [8:16]
13. II. Molto adagio [9:37]
14. III. Molto allegro (come prima) - Presto [2:35]

15. Harold Arlen (1905-1986) - Over the Rainbow (arr. by William Ryden) [3:39]

TT: 1:06:00

PTC: 5187227

Home was recorded at KMFA 89.5, Austin's Classical Music Radio Station, Austin, between January
(Puts tracks 1-3, Shaw tracks 5-11, Arlen track 15) and April (Walker track 4, Barber tracks 12-14), 2023

Production Team:
Executive Producer - David & Amy Fulton
Recording Producer, Session Producer, Recording & Mastering Engineer - Da-Hong Seetoo
Liner Notes - John Largess
Cover Design - Marjolein Coenrady
Photography - Jeff Wilson
Product Management & Design - Francesca Mariani & Kasper van Kooten

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