Duke Performances: Ciompi Quartet

PRESS RELEASE:

The Ciompi Quartet opens its 2020/2021 season with an eclectic program spanning four centuries of music. The evening opens with Webern’s Langsamer Satz, a deeply expressive, emotional and tonal work written by Webern at age 21, on holiday and deeply in love with his cousin and future wife, Wilhelmine Mortl. Duke composer Stephen Jaffe’s Third String Quartet, “A Tapestry,” follows; the piece was a 2014 commission by the Ciompi. Jaffe himself describes the piece as a “gathering of musical fragments woven into a whole,” an entwining of musical thoughts ranging in length from one to five minutes. To close the program, the quartet will perform one of Mozart’s early masterpieces — the fifth of his “Viennese” quartets. Written when Mozart was just seventeen, the work is a sign of his maturity and mastery of galant style.

— Harrison Russin