Rolston String Quartet

The Rolston String Quartet has taken the classical music world by storm since their inception in 2013, winning the Banff International String Quartet Competition in 2016. Their 2019 debut Tchaikovsky recording received a five-star review from BBC Music Magazine, announcing their arrival on the international stage.

This dynamic ensemble makes their Chamber Arts Society debut with a program that surrounds Jörg Widmann's "Hunting Quartet" (2003) with two 19th century masterpieces. The Widmann work borrows a 'healthy' hunting theme from Schumann's Papillons, transforming it to the point where the upper three strings wind up "blaming" the cello for being a hunter. This delightful work is preceded by Beethoven's Opus 135, considered by many musicologists to be not the last quartet of the composer's Late Period but rather the first quartet of what would have been his Fourth Period, had he lived longer. The Beethoven and Widmann pieces, taken together, offer a wholly new context in which to appreciate Mendelssohn's emotional String Quartet No. 4.