The Brentano String Quartet performs on Sunday, April 22 at 3 p.m. in Memorial Chapel.
Yale’s quartet-in-residence returns to the series in a wide-ranging program highlighted by a commissioned work by American composer Matthew Aucoin, Soft Power. The afternoon also offers Haydn’s B-minor Quartet, Op. 64, No. 2; Beethoven’s C-minor Quartet, Op. 18, No. 4; Shostakovich’s 12thQuartet. The concert will be preceded by a discussion led by the provost and dean of The Juilliard School Ara Guzelimian with violinist Mark Steinberg and Aucoin.
Since its inception in 1992, the Brentano String Quartet has appeared throughout the world to popular and critical acclaim. Within a few years of its formation, the quartet garnered the first Cleveland Quartet Award and the Naumburg Chamber Music Award; and in 1996 the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center invited them to be the inaugural members of Chamber Music Society Two. The following season the quartet became the first quartet-in-residence at Princeton University. The quartet is the quartet-in-residence at Yale University, and serves as the collaborative ensemble for the Van Cliburn Competition.
Born in 1990, Matthew Aucoin is an American composer, conductor, pianist, and writer. This season, Aucoin is artist-in-residence at the LA Opera, which features him as a composer and conductor, culminating in the 2019 premiere of a commissioned opera. Other recent opera commissions include those from the Lyric Opera of Chicago and a new opera for the Metropolitan Opera/Lincoln Center Theater. He was the subject of two feature articles in major periodicals – the Wall Street Journal (“Is Matthew Aucoin the next Leonard Bernstein?” and the New York Times (“Matthew Aucoin, Opera’s Great 25-Year-Old Hope”).
Individual tickets are $30. All students are free.