VC LIVE | Calidore Quartet at the Music@Menlo Chamber Music Festival

Tune in here on Wednesday, August 30th at 7:00 PM (ET) for a chamber music concert featuring the Calidore String Quartet performing Beethoven's string quartets

We're coming to you live from Music@Menlo, an internationally acclaimed chamber music festival and institute in the San Francisco Bay Area. Founded by David Finckel and Wu Han as a program of Menlo School, Music@Menlo features unique immersive programming, a roster of world-class artists, and a Chamber Music Institute for emerging and pre-professional musicians.

The final chapter of the Beethoven Quartet cycle is its most consequential, summing up the composer as no other program could. In the seven-movement Op. 131, we experience the culmination of his structural expansion, in which the composer added a movement to each successive quartet beginning with Op. 130. Played without pause, the opening fugue returns in the finale, building to the work’s conclusion. With Op. 135, Beethoven looks backward and forward simultaneously, remembering the classical age and peeking through narrow openings to the music of the future.

Program:

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770–1827)

String Quartet in C-sharp minor, op. 131 (1826)

String Quartet in F major, op. 135 (1826)

Recipient of the 2018 Avery Fisher Career Grant and the 2017 Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award, VC Artist Calidore String Quartet first made international headlines as the winner of the $100,000 Grand Prize at the 2016 M-Prize International Chamber Music Competition. The quartet was the first and only North American ensemble to win the Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship, was a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist, and is currently in residence with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

As a passionate supporter of music education, the Calidore String Quartet is committed to mentoring and educating young musicians, students, and audiences. In 2021, the Calidore String Quartet joined the faculty of the University of Delaware School of Music and serve as directors of the newly established Graduate String Quartet Residency. Formerly, they served as artists-in-residence at the University of Toronto, the University of Michigan, and Stony Brook University.