When Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Adams heard the St. Lawrence String Quartet play, he was so inspired he wrote music for them.  At Duke, the group critics call “visceral and passionate, yet rooted in a ferocious attention to the details of the score” (Toronto Globe & Mail) pairs one of the visionary masterworks of the western canon, Beethoven’s opus 131, with that equally personal work Adams composed expressly for them.

“The St. Lawrence are remarkable not simply for the quality of their music making, exalted as it is, but for the joy they take in the act of connection.”
— Alex Ross, The New Yorker

Beethoven: String Quartet in C Sharp Minor, Op. 131
John Adams: String Quartet (2008, St. Lawrence String Quartet Commission)