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Experience pivotal works by composers who exploded the idea of what a string quartet can be—and in doing so, became iconic voices of their time. The illustrious Ariel Quartet, considered to be among the most fiery, impassioned, and innovative musical stewards of our time, delivers this Beethoven Bicentennial concert. Beethoven challenged, inspired, haunted, and set the bar for all music to come. This program shows us how he voices his own evolution, and how the act of doing so fueled music-making by those who came after him. His Opus 132, a late masterpiece, pushes beyond where quartets—including his—had ever been. Here, music is confession: It features one of the most famous and deeply personal movements in all of the quartet literature, Beethoven’s poignant utterance on mortality. With the String Quartet No. 2, “Ist es wahr?” (“Is it true?”), young Mendelssohn is in dialogue with his idol. Written the year of Beethoven’s death, eighteen-year-old Mendelssohn models his piece on Beethoven’s final quartets, especially in its cyclic form and deeply personal origins. Two centuries later, Blueprint, by Pulitzer Prize- and Grammy-winning composer Caroline Shaw, is a musical conversation with Beethoven and Haydn. It is a harmonic reduction of Beethoven’s early Opus 18, No. 6 quartet, and radically and remarkably explores its structural, joyful, and melancholic elements.

approx. 2 hours, with one 15-minute intermission

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