The Well-Tempered Ear
The Pro Arte Quartet plays the fourth installment of its FREE Beethoven string quartet cycle online TONIGHT at 7:30 CDT
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By Jacob Stockinger
The historic Pro Arte Quartet, in residence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Mead Witter School of Music, will perform the fourth installment of its FREE Beethoven string quartet cycle TONIGHT — Friday, Oct. 23 — at 7:30 p.m. CDT. (It should be posted for about a day, but will not be archived due to copyright considerations.)
Because of the coronavirus pandemic, the live concert will take place online and will be live-streamed without an audience from the Mead Witter Foundation Concert Hall in the new Hamel Music Center.
You can stream it live from https://youtu.be/IhmNRNiI3RM
The whole series of concerts are part of the Pro Arte Quartet’s yearlong retrospective to celebrate the Beethoven Year. This December marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of the composer (below).
Members of the Pro Arte Quartet (below, in a photo by Rick Langer) are: David Perry and Suzanne Beia, violins; Sally Chisholm, viola; and Parry Karp, cello.
A pre-concert lecture by UW-Madison musicology Professor Charles Dill (below, in a photo by Katrin Talbot) starts at 7:30 p.m. CDT.
The program consists of one early and one late quartet: the string Quartet in C Minor, Op. 18 No. 4 (1798-1800), and you can hear the first movement played by the Dover Quartet in the YouTube video at the bottom; and the String Quartet in E-Flat Major, Op. 127 (1825).
The Pro Arte Quartet is one of the world’s most distinguished string quartets. Founded by conservatory students in Brussels in 1912, it became one of the most celebrated ensembles in Europe in the first half of the 20th century and was named Court Quartet to the Queen of Belgium.
Its world reputation blossomed in 1919 when the quartet (below, in 1928) began the first of many tours that enticed notable composers such as Bartok, Barber, Milhaud, Honegger, Martin and Casella to write new works for the ensemble.
The Pro Arte Quartet performs throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia and continues to champion both standard repertoire and new music.
Since being stranded in the U.S. when Belgium was invaded by Hitler and the Nazis in World War II, the group is an ensemble-in-residence at the Mead Witter School of Music and resident quartet of the Chazen Museum of Art.
The quartet, the longest active string quartet in the history of music, has performed at the White House and, during the centennial celebration, played for the King’s Counselor in Belgium.
Recent projects include the complete quartets of Bartok and Shostakovich and, in collaboration with the Orion and Emerson String Quartets, the complete quartets of Beethoven.
Regular chamber music collaborators that perform with Pro Arte include Samuel Rhodes and Nobuko Imai, viola; Bonnie Hampton, cello; and the late Leon Fleischer and Christopher Taylor, piano.
Together since 1995, the quartet has recorded works of Mendelssohn, Dvorak, Rhodes, Shapey, Sessions, Fennelly, Diesendruck, Lehrdahl and the centennial commissions.
For more information and background, go to: https://www.music.wisc.edu/event/pro-arte-quartet-beethoven-string-quartet-cycle-program-iv/
For more about the challenges and modifications – including wearing masks and social distancing — of doing the Beethoven cycle for the virtual online performances and about the other dates and programs in the cycle, go to: https://welltempered.wordpress.com/2020/09/29/classical-music-uw-madisons-pro-arte-quartet-to-resume-its-free-beethoven-cycle-virtual-and-online-this-friday-night-with-two-other-programs-this-semester/
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Classical music: This Friday night, Nov. 22, the UW-Madison’s Pro Arte Quartet begins its 14-month complete cycle of Beethoven’s 16 string quartets. Here are programs and information about the six concerts
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By Jacob Stockinger
As you might have already heard, 2020 is a Beethoven Year. Musicians are already marking the 250th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827, below).
One of the big local events – unfolding over the next 14 months — is that the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s acclaimed Pro Arte Quartet will perform a complete, six-concert cycle of Beethoven’s 16 string quartets, which are considered to be a monumental milestone in chamber music and in the development of the genre.
They encompass the styles of Beethoven’s early, middle and late periods, and often served as an experimental laboratory for musical ideas he used on other works. Each of the Pro Arte’s programs wisely features works from different periods, which makes comparisons and differences easier to understand. (You can hear Beethoven biographer Jan Stafford discuss the late quartets in the YouTube video at the bottom.)
For more about Beethoven’s string quartets, go to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:String_quartets_by_Ludwig_van_Beethoven
A Beethoven cycle is also what originally brought the Pro Arte Quartet from Belgium — where it was founded by students at the Royal Conservatory in 1912 — to Madison, where they performed it at the Wisconsin Union Theater in 1940. In fact, they were in the process of performing the cycle when they heard that their homeland of Belgium has been invaded by Hitler and the Nazis, and they could not go home.
Stranded here by World War II, they were offered a chance to be artists-in-residence at the UW-Madison. They accepted — and the quartet has remained here since, becoming the longest performing quartet in music history.
For more about the history of the Pro Arte (below, in 1928), go to: https://www.music.wisc.edu/pro-arte-quartet/
Current members of the Pro Arte Quartet (below from left, in a photo by Rick Langer) are: David Perry and Suzanne Beia, violins; Sally Chisholm, viola; and Parry Karp, cello.
PROGRAM I: Friday, Nov. 22, 8 p.m. in Collins Recital Hall
String Quartet in G Major, Op. 18, No. 2 (1798-1800)
String Quartet in F Minor, Op. 95 “Serioso” (1810)
String Quartet in B-Flat Major, Op. 130 (1825-6)
PROGRAM II: Friday, Feb. 28, 8 p.m., Mead Witter Foundation Concert Hall
String Quartet in F Major, Op. 18, No. 1 (1798-1800)
String Quartet in E-Flat Major, Op. 74 “Harp” (1809)
String Quartet in C-Sharp Minor, Op. 131 (1826)
PROGRAM III: Thursday, April 16 (NOT April 23, as was mistakenly listed in a press release), 7:30 p.m., Mead Witter Foundation Concert Hall
String Quartet in D Major, Op. 18, No. 3 (1798-1800)
String Quartet in E Minor, Op. 59, No. 2 (1806)
String Quartet in E-Flat Major, Op. 127 (1825)
PROGRAM IV: Friday, Oct. 2, 2020, 8 p.m., Mead Witter Foundation Concert Hall
String Quartet in A Major, Op. 18, No. 5 (1798-1800)
String Quartet in C Minor, Op. 18, No. 4 (1798-1800)
String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 132 (1825)
PROGRAM V: Friday, Nov. 20, 2020, 8 p.m., Mead Witter Foundation Concert Hall
String Quartet in B-Flat Major, Op. 18, No. 6 (1798-1800)
String Quartet in F Major, Op. 135 (1826)
String Quartet in C Major, Op. 59, No. 3 (1806)
PROGRAM VI: Saturday, Jan. 30, 2021, 8 p.m., Mead Witter Foundation Concert Hall
String Quartet in F Major, Op. 59, No. 1 (1806)
String Quartet in B-Flat Major, Op. 130 with the Great Fugue Finale, Op. 133 (1825)
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Classical music: The UW Pro Arte Quartet in Belgium -– Day 5. The Belgian premiere of a Belgian composition at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Brussels draws a big enough crowd to run out of programs and bring three curtain calls. A visit to the Royal Conservatory Library reveals the notebooks of Mozart’s wife Constanza and takes the quartet back to its roots for a performance. Plus, the Pro Arte gets recorded by Belgian TV and radio.
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By Jacob Stockinger
Editor’s note: The Well-Tempered Ear has asked people on tour with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Pro Arte Quartet (below, in a photo by Rick Langer) to file whatever dispatches. updates and photos are possible — from iPads, computers, cameras and smart phones — so that they can to keep the fans back here at home current with what is happening on the concert stage and off.
By now it has become apparent that the Pro Arte Quartet’s tour of Belgium is as big an event to the Belgians and to local residents there as it has been to Madisonians, Wisconsinites and alumni of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music.
Just before taking a day’s rest, Sarah Schaffer (below), who manages the University of Wisconsin-Madison Pro Arte String Quartet, sent this text and this photo essay. They cover the return to Brussels from Dolhain Limbourg, the hometown of founding violinist Alphonse Onnou. Then the members of the quartet visited the Royal Conservatory of Music in Brussels where they toured the archives and library and also performed, including a rehearsal that was recorded for the national radio network.
Current members are violinists David Perry and Suzanne Beia; violist Sally Chisholm; and cellist Parry Karp.
Today’s Part 5 covers the extensive events at the Royal Conservatory of Music, where the frenetic pace just kept gathering speed. A concert tour is hard work, no glamorous vacation!
If you want background or need to catch up, here are links:
To Day 1:
To Day 2:
To Day 3:
To Day 4, Part 1:
To Day 4, Part 2:
Sarah Schaffer writes:
Today brought the Belgian premiere of Belgian composer Benoît Mernier’s Quartet No. 3, commissioned by Pro Arte Quartet for its centennial, a special commission harking back to its Belgian origins, in the very hall at the Royal Conservatory of Music where the founding quartet played countless times, both as students and after.
Engineers from musiq3, the French-speaking Belgian national radio, set up equipment and record the concert rehearsal for later broadcast. TV and newspapers have also covered the quartet.
It was so perfectly appropriate, and so very moving: this hall, this city, this composer, this work, this audience of mainly students, all at the ages now that the original Pro Arte Quartet members (below) Onnou, Halleux, Prevost and Maas would have been back then.
There were so many concert attendees that the printed programs (below) ran out.
The short program included — after remarks from Anne van Malderen (below top) on the history of the quartet and an introduction of his work, with examples played by PAQ, by Messieur Mernier (below bottom): Mernier’s Third Quartet, the Adagio and Fugue, K. 546, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, American composer Randall Thompson‘s “Wind in the Willows” and the famous Adagio for Strings from the String Quartet No. 1 by American composer Samuel Barber.
Applause called the PAQ back to the stage three times.
Our visit to the Conservatoire began earlier in the day with a tour by librarian Olivia Wahnon (below).
This distinguished archival collection contains the most manuscript holdings among all Belgian libraries, and she had prepared for our benefit some beautiful displays of rare materials.
Some of what we saw was related to the Pro Arte and string quartets. There were many manuscript scores and parts, particularly from the collection of second violinist Laurent Halleaux, and many concert programs.
But not everything was about PAQ! We see a Medieval handbook manuscript of chant:
We also had a glimpse of Constanze Mozart’s diary (below, in a photo by Sally Chisholm, you can see it is multilingual, and contains many beautiful drawings and paintings), a page of manuscript by Franz Liszt, and the teensiest, tiniest bound volume of Medieval manuscripts. Such treasures! Constanza wrote about her husband Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: “Husband genius. Still poor.”
For us, the division of the institution into two nationalities—Flemish and Walloon—seems somewhat incomprehensible and impossible to manage and navigate. Yet it is so much the history and culture of the whole country, especially evident after yesterday’s elections, it is simply taken in stride.
Although the whole infrastructure (below are photos of the conservatory’s exterior) is in a state of dilapidation—built in the mid-19th century, with a major renovation planned beginning in 2015 — it was in its way more touching and meaningful to see it now, while we can more easily imagine how it looked and felt when the first Quatuor Pro Arte (QPA) inhabited its halls and spaces a century ago.
Composer Benoit Mernier (below top, applauding the Pro Arte Quartet, and below bottom) reports he is well pleased with the progress that he hears in the playing of his piece, from its world premiere March 1 in Madison to now, just 2-1/2 months later. He hears the players inhabiting the work more: details are more precise; at the same time they bring more fluidity; and the overall arc and shape are now more convincingly presented.
One more chance to improve even more at the final concert tomorrow at the university in Louvain-la-Neuve.
Tomorrow: Our last day and final concert, at Louvain-la-Neuve. The week has sped by.
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