This Friday I’m playing on another live stream broadcast, this time with my other quartet, the Arnica Quartet. We basically just play music we like, from all eras that there is repertoire for the classical string quartet formation. I wrote an entry for the 45th Parallel Universe blog – here’s the beginning, head over there for the rest!
“Before the onset of the global pandemic, much of the news in the classical music sphere was concerned with the 250th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven. It was almost too much for some of us. “Why do we need more Beethoven?” we asked. In ordinary times, we have the luxury of questioning those canonical compositions and their creators – art grows and evolves through such questioning. But difficult times not only require challenging ourselves and the status quo, but also finding solace to get us through those hard times. There is something about the struggles that Beethoven so lucidly portrays in his music that we can relate to in times of both ease and difficulty.
Beethoven is arguably the most masterful of string quartet composers, and certainly among the most autobiographical. You can see his life’s evolution over the course of his three compositional periods, and most explicitly in his cycle of 16 string quartets.”
Click here to read the rest.