This program features three of history’s great musical minds whose imagination transformed Western music. A performance of Stravinsky’s string quartet oeuvre, which was composed after the riotous fallout from his Rite of Spring, begs the question: is this modernist only just a Neo-Classicist? Mozart, while respecting his rich Classical traditions, mightily expands the scope of his musical statements beyond the four basic string quartet voices in his Viola Quintet in C Major. Perhaps it was Beethoven’s very deafness that enabled him to let his creativity offend the ears of his time—leaping ahead with this still contemporary-sounding Great Fugue—in what many experts feel is “the first composition of the 20th Century!”

Program

• STRAVINSKY:
  • Three Pieces for String Quartet (1914)
  • Double Canon “Raoul Dufy in Memoriam” (1959)
  • Concertino, for String Quartet (1920)
• BEETHOVEN:
  • Grosse Fuge, Op. 133 (1825)
• MOZART:
  • Viola Quintet in C Major, K.515 (1787)