The Town Quartet at Vessel Gallery

The Town Quartet is proud to present an exciting night of music by Bartok, Brahms, and Ginastera. Bartok's 2nd quartet from 1917 shows the composer at full maturity, employing innovative techniques like compound variation, or drawing on old forms, like the rondo. By this time he had thoroughly studied Hungarian folk music, some of which shows up from time to time. We would like to thank Joan Jeanrenaud for her generous help as we prepared this piece.

Brahm's 3rd quartet, Op. 67 in B flat Major, is an important work in the string quartet chronology. While he toiled over his first 2 quartets, his 3rd flowed from the pen during his summer in the country in 1875. The music is Brahms at his best; romantic in content, classical in form, but employing the technique of developing variation, as Schoenberg later dubbed it.

Ginastera wrote his first quartet in 1948, shortly after a period of studying with Aaron Copland. It was premiered in Buenos Aries, and was later performed in Europe, helping establish Ginastera as one of the world's elite composers. The piece was a turning point in Ginastera's musical path, becoming the first work of his self-described subjective nationalism period. This means that while the music is still inspired by the folk elements that dominated his objective nationalism period, those elements are not referenced directly.