Music Building, Recital Hall

The quartet will perform an ambitious FREE series in May of twelve masterworks over six concerts, including on May 21: Beethoven Beethoven String Quartet No. 2 in G Major — The most charming and witty of the set, full of courtly elegance and Haydnesque humor, with a slow movement that pulls off a delightful trick: a playful scherzo suddenly bursts through the middle of a tender operatic aria. AND Mozart String Quintet in D Major, K. 593 (1790) — The most intellectually rigorous of the six, leaner and more concentrated than its predecessors. Listen for the stately opening that keeps returning like a philosophical refrain, and a slow movement that ends with what one reviewer called "a sad smile."

The quartet will perform an ambitious FREE series in May of twelve masterworks over six concerts, including on May 26: Beethoven String Quartet No. 6 in B-flat Major — The finale alone sets this quartet apart from everything else in Op. 18: a haunting, chromatic slow introduction marked La Malinconia repeatedly interrupts a cheerful dance in an escalating psychological tug-of-war, before the whole thing races to a breathless, whirlwind conclusion at Beethoven's fastest tempo marking anywhere in his output. AND Mozart String Quintet in E-flat Major, K. 614 (1791) — Mozart's last chamber work, yet utterly free of valediction — just open-air good humor and Haydnesque mischief.

The quartet will perform an ambitious FREE series in May of twelve masterworks over six concerts, including on May 28: Beethoven String Quartet No. 3 in D Major — The gentlest and most lyrical of the six quartets transforms completely in its finale, a blazing Presto that hijacks the entire work and then, at the last possible moment, dissolves into a teasing whisper rather than the expected triumphant close. AND Mozart String Quintet in C Minor, K. 406 (1787) — The odd one out: a transcription of a wind serenade, startlingly dark for the genre. The highlight is a minuet built on a mirror canon that Erik Smith described as "two swans reflected in still water."