The Well-Tempered Ear
Classical music: The UW-Madison’s Pro Arte Quartet – music’s oldest string quartet — will play a FREE concert of late quartets by Haydn, Beethoven and Shostakovich this Friday night
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By Jacob Stockinger
Clocking in at over 100 years old, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Pro Arte Quartet (below in a photo by Rick Langer) is the longest-lived string quartet in the history of music.
Current members are (from left) David Perry and Suzanne Beia, violins; Sally Chisholm, viola; and Parry Karp, cello.
Ever since it was founded in Brussels, Belgium in 1912 and then in 1938 found refuge from World War II as the first musical artists-in-residence at the UW-Madison (or anywhere), the Pro Arte has had the reputation of commissioning and championing living composers and new works. Such composers, whose works they also premiered, include Samuel Barber, Bela Bartok, Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, Frank Martin and many others.
Here is a link with some of its background:
https://www.music.wisc.edu/event/pro-arte-quartet-4/
And here is a link to a more expanded history of the Pro Arte, along with a schedule of concerts this season:
https://www.music.wisc.edu/pro-arte-quartet/
But the Pro Arte Quartet (below, performing at Carnegie Hall in a photo by Rick Langer) is also unparalleled in performing the classics of the quartet repertoire.
You can hear that for yourself this coming Friday night at 8 p.m. in Mills Hall, when they will play a FREE concert of three quartets that came late in the composers’ careers.
The quartet will perform the famous and aptly nicknamed “Sunrise” String Quartet in B-flat Major, Op. 76, No. 4, by Franz Joseph Haydn; the late Beethoven String Quartet No. 15 in A minor, Op. 132, with its “Heiliger Dankgesang” – or “Sacred Hymn of Thanksgiving” (which you can hear and see graphically depicted in the YouTube video at the bottom); and the String Quartet No. 7, Op. 108, by Dmitri Shostakovich.
The Ear thinks the program is hard to beat for either experienced string quartets listeners or for newcomers to the genre.
He bets you will too.
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