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Thursday, March 08, 2012

The Arditti Quartet Comes to Town

On April 12, 2012, the Arditti Quartet, great champions of new music for nearly 40 years, come to San Francisco Performances. Here's what they're playing:

BEETHOVEN
Grosse Fuge in B-flat Major, Opus 133

BERG
String Quartet, Opus 3
Langsam
Massige Viertel

INTERMISSION

ADÈS
The Four Quarters
Nightfalls
Serenade: Morning Dew
Days
The Twenty-Fifth Hour

BARTÓK
String Quartet No. 4
Allegro
Prestissimo, con sordino
Non troppo lento
Allegretto pizzicato
Allegro molto




I heard the Calder play The Four Quarters this past fall; looking forward to hearing the piece again.

2 comments:

  1. Great champions of new music indeed. Just a shame that you won’t be hearing much of it.

    Not enough new music gets put on in Vienna and our big annual contemporary music festival is a snoozefest compared to events like Huddersfield, but at least we have the Klangforum Wien and the opportunity to hear people like Lachenmann, Ferneyhough, Birtwistle, Sciarrino etc. – and played well – once, sometimes twice a month during the season.

    Are San Francisco audiences really so hopeless that they couldn’t sit through the type of programme the Ardittis typically offer in Europe, even in our avant-garde-allergic city? I’ve grown to be less snooty about Adès and Bartók’s 4th is really quite modern, but it’s all music which the Emersons or the Julliards could play just as well. The Ardittis like to get out of their niche from time to time and America is a convenient place to do that, but it’s a niche of great richness which no other string quartet seems interested in and you guys are missing out.

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  2. There's a real audience in SF for the kind of music the Arditti usually plays, yes. I don't know how they arrived at this particular program.

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