Indeed a fine ensemble, whose playing is admirable in its tautness of focus and refinement of detail.

Gramophone

The Tesla Quartet is acclaimed for their superb capacity to find the inner heart of everything they play, regardless of era, style, or technical demand” (The International Review of Music). The ensemble brings a program of Schubert, Webern and Mozart.

One of the hallmarks of Schubert’s music is his ability to slip almost imperceptibly between major and minor tonalities. His final string quartet, No. 15 in G major, inhabits a multitude of harmonic worlds almost simultaneously, and the breadth of the work creates a space to take in the vast expanse of the composer’s imagination. While the quartet has many of the melodically mellifluous qualities of his other works, it also features outbursts of starkly contrasting harmonies that border on disorienting, begging the question, is the work really in G major, or G minor?

Mozart’s G major Quartet, K. 387, by contrast, is unabashedly sunny and playful. One of a set of six quartets dedicated to Haydn, the work’s themes are quirky and effervescent and feel designed to elicit giggles from the listener. More brooding is the single-movement Langsamer Satz of Anton Webern that opens the program. This darkly lyrical work is one of only a few lush Romantic pieces by the composer better know for his terse serialism of the Second Viennese School.

Program

Vienna by Day and Night

Webern: Langsamer Satz
Mozart: String Quartet No. 14 in G major, K. 387
Schubert: String Quartet No. 15 in G major, D. 887

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