St. Lawrence String Quartet

Hailed by The Washington Post as "fearless musicians whose spontaneity stretches past conventional interpretation and probes the music's imaginative limits," the St. Lawrence String Quartet return to Duke Performances with another kaleidoscopic program. Their sound, notes The New York Times, "has just about everything one wants from a quartet, most notably precision, warmth, and an electricity that conveys the excitement of playing whatever is on their stands at the moment."

For this visit, the St. Lawrence begin with Haydn, their touchstone composer. Haydn's Quartet in C Major is a piece the musicologist William Drabkin calls "one of the supreme achievements of the Classical period." They contrast that classicism with a rare chance to hear Camille Saint-Saëns' romantic First Quartet, a piece that owes a great deal to Brahms. With these works as a foundation, they reveal the op. 132 of Beethoven as a timeless work which, despite its chronology, is neither classic nor romantic.