Aris Quartet Launches New CMSF Season

The first chamber music recital in the 2026 Chamber Music San Francisco (CMSF) season took place yesterday afternoon in Herbst Theatre. The program was performed by the Aris Quartet, whose members currently are violinists Sophia Jaffé (substituting for the ensemble’s leader) and Noëmi Zipperling, Caspar Vinzens on viola, and cellist Lukas Sieber. The program was a straightforward one, framed by two of the three “B” composers.

The program began with Ludwig van Beethoven in a performance of the second of his six “early” string quartets, Opus 18, Number 2, composed in the key of G major. Johannes Brahms provided the conclusion with the second of his Opus 51 quartets, set in the key of A minor. The “middle ground” was taken by Dmitri Shostakovich with a performance of what is probably his best-known string quartet, Opus 110 (the eighth) in C minor.

There is much to enjoy in Beethoven’s Opus 18. One can appreciate his sense of humor during his early period, most evident in the G major quartet with the Allegro “disruption” of the second Adagio cantabile movement. Also, the third movement is a scherzo, making a significant departure from Joseph Haydn’s use of the minuet. (Haydn’s Opus 33 quartets originally had scherzi, but he replaced them with minuets!) The Brahms quartets, receive far less attention; so I was particularly glad to see the Aris Quartet compensating for that shortcoming. They were as attentive to Brahms as they were to Beethoven, and the journey was just as engaging.

Shostakovich was in Dresden when he composed his Opus 110 quartet, and it was inspired by those in Dresden that were victims of the firebombing in World War II. By the time he composed this music, he was not shy in working his initials (D-S-C-H) into the score. Also, those familiar with the “Leningrad” symphony (Opus 60 in C major) know that it included a shave-and-a-haircut motif, which returns in Opus 110, now in a minor key.

Bust of Erwin Schulhoff at the fortress Wülzburg near Weißenburg in Bavaria (photograph by Aarp65, from Wikimedia Commons Web page, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

For the encores the ensemble turned to Czech composers. They began with the “Alla Czecha” movement from Erwin Schulhoff’s Five Pieces for String Quartet. This was followed by Antonín Dvořák’s B. 152, his string quartet setting of Cypresses. The quartet played the penultimate movement, “Nature Lies Peaceful in Slumber and Dreaming.” This provided the perfectly polite and proper way to say farewell to an attentive audience!