Friday, February 14, 2020

NEQ to Present a “Post-Beethoven” Program

New Esterházy Quartet members Lisa Weiss, Anthony Martin, William Skeen, and Kati Kyme (photograph by Barbara Butkus, from the NEQ Web site)

Next weekend the New Esterházy Quartet (NEQ) will continue their thirteenth season with the third in their planned series of four concerts. The title of the program will be Beyond Beethoven (Quartets from the New Generation). The title was inspired by an article by Robert Schumann, which singles out composers for pursuing “the path of the masters,” those “masters” being Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven. The composers to be represented on the NEQ program will be Georges Onslow and the two Mendelssohns, Felix and his sister Fanny.

As of this writing, NEQ has not identified the specific compositions to be performed. However, thanks to the booklet notes for the Quatuor Ebène album Felix & Fanny, I was able to establish that Fanny wrote only one string quartet, in the key of E-flat major and composed in 1834. Taken together with a brief note in electronic mail I received from NEQ, my “educated guess” for the “Felix quartet” is that it will be one of the three Opus 44 quartets, all of which were written in the same decade as Fanny’s quartet. On the other hand Onslow was particularly prolific in composing string quartets during that same decade; so any guess I would make would be wild, rather than educated!

The San Francisco performance of this program will take place on Saturday, February 22, at 4 p.m. As usual, the venue will be St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, which is located at 1111 O’Farrell Street, just west of the corner of Franklin Street. General admission is $30. Seniors, the disabled, and members of the San Francisco Early Music Society will be admitted for $25; and there is a $10 rate for students with valid identification. Tickets may be purchased online through a Brown Paper Tickets Web page.

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