Brentano String Quartet

Over the course of twenty years, the Brentano String Quartet have built a broad discography encompassing the central European canon and new music alike, earning a reputation as one of America's great veteran ensembles. Recently succeeding the Tokyo Quartet as Artists-in-Residence at Yale, the Brentano are known for their 'luxuriously warm sound and yearning lyricism' (The New York Times).The evening opens with selections from Bach's Art of the Fugue, a landmark collection over which the composer labored in the last decade of his life and left unfinished. These experiments in form remain a pinnacle of contrapuntal writing, and have been transcribed for dozens of different ensembles. The complexity of Bach serves as a context for both the early lyricism of Mendelssohn's op. 12 and the mature passion of Brahms' op. 67.