In the News

A good string quartet, wisdom has it, is like a single instrument with 16 strings. That sort of unity of sound and purpose is a given in any performance by the extraordinary Jerusalem Quartet, which on Thursday completed the opening leg of a marathon in which it will play all six Bartok quartets and the first six quartets by Beethoven within a single week at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. But during the Andante of Bartok’s Quartet No.

The official biography of the Hagen Quartet, which made a rare Southern California appearance at the Samueli Theater in Costa Mesa on Tuesday night, begins with a quote from a Zurich newspaper calling the ensemble "undoubtedly the world's most famous quartet."

Mozart's string quartets are core chamber music repertoire. That much is beyond question. But a concentrated series of concerts exclusively devoted to Mozart quartets, an approach familiar with the quartets of Beethoven, Schubert or Bartók – that’s a bit unusual. Does this relatively rare opportunity suggest a slight modern tendency to take this music for granted?

Originally composed of four siblings, the present incarnati of the ensemble, with second violinist Rainer Schmidt the only non-Hagen family member in the group, has played as a unit for more than 30 years. They barely seem old enough for that to be true; and certainly there was no hint of jaded routine in their approach to early works by three composers of differing styles but a shared youthful zest.

David Finckel and Wu Han are chamber music royalty. On Sunday afternoon, the couple — heads of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Music@Menlo festival and the record company ArtistLed — reigned at the Barns at Wolf Trap with a wildly engaging performance of all five Beethoven cello sonatas.

Save for a handful of renegades and visionaries, classical musicians tend to put fidelity to the score close to the top of their priorities. That comes with certain constraints—especially when playing works like Ludwig van Beethoven’s string quartets, which have been analyzed, performed, and reconsidered over and over again during the course of the past 200 years. So it’s refreshing to discover that the young musicians of the Danish String Quartet have a new way of looking at this repertoire.

They bonded around a football stuck in a tree. “It was our first challenge as a string quartet,” quips DSQ violist Asbjørn Nørgaard. Several years and first prizes later, the foursome faces a different challenge: a complete Beethoven cycle and recordings of the late quartets for ECM.

I’ve been following this extraordinary group for years, but I really understood their mojo only after I met them all in their basement studio at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen.

Angelin Preljocaj continues his folkloric narratives with La Fresque, subtitled after its inspiration, the eponymous medieval Chinese tale, The Mural, from the collection Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio by Pu Songling, first published in 1740.

Parisian choreographer Angelin Preljocaj sold out Europe's largest performing arts venue with his modern ballet, La Fresque (2016) on November 18th, walking onstage after the show to receive the Honorary Award from Istanbul's Theater Festival at Zorlu Center PSM.