Sunday, May 23, 2010 at 7:30 PM
Free evening concerts performed in the beautiful, intimate, illuminated setting of Second Presbyterian Church by members of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.
It has often been suggested that Bartók was inspired to write String Quartet, No. 3 after hearing a performance of Alban Berg's Lyric Suite (1926) in 1927. It is Bartók's shortest quartet, with a typical performance lasting around fifteen minutes. The work utilizes a number of extended instrumental techniques, including sul ponticello (playing with the bow as close as possible to the bridge), col legno (playing with the wood rather than the hair of the bow), glissandi (sliding from one note to another) and the so-called Bartók pizzicato (plucking the string so that it rebounds against the instrument's fingerboard).Donald.
Composed in 1924 and premiered in 1927, Quintet, Op. 39 accurately expresses the musical Paris of the 1920s. Prokofiev was commissioned to compose a ballet of several short pieces for the unusual woodwind and string combination. Maintaining the original instrumentation, he later arranged the work into a six-movement concert suite.