The Ciompi finish their season with a panoramic view of Beethoven’s seminal string quartets. They start where the composer started, with his String Quartet No. 3, the first he composed. Jumping nearly thirty years to the pinnacle of Beethoven’s quartet writing, they take on his complex and wildly experimental Quartet in C-sharp Minor. Robert Schumann marveled that this monumental work stands “on the extreme boundary of all that has hitherto been attained by human art and imagination.” Your navigator for the journey is British composer and scholar Gerard McBurney, whom the Chicago Tribune called “the sort of musical tour guide we haven’t heard much of in this country since Leonard Bernstein.”

Beethoven: String Quartet in D Major, op. 18, no. 3
Beethoven: String Quartet in C-sharp Minor, op. 131