Arditti Quartet featuring Eliot Fisk, Guitar

Sunday, April 2, 2017 | 7:00 pm

Baldwin Auditorium

We regret that our presentation of the Arditti Quartet featuring Eliot Fisk has been cancelled due to a scheduling conflict. We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause, and we encourage ticket holders to contact the University Box Office at 919-684-4444 to arrange an exchange.

The Arditti Quartet is the only chamber ensemble ever to receive the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, the “Nobel Prize of Music,” usually awarded to individuals; Eliot Fisk was called “one of the most brilliant, intelligent, and gifted artists of our time” by his mentor, the guitarist Andrés Segovia. What these musicians share is a passionate love for contemporary music, with both the British quartet and the American guitarist dedicated to commissioning, performing, and recording new work.

This is the legendary Arditti Quartet’s first visit to Duke Performances, and they begin the program on their own, with a performance of the Mexican composer Hilda Paredes’ Bitacora Capilar, written to celebrate the Arditti’s 40th anniversary. They follow this with one of their trademark pieces: an eerie and rarely performed quartet by the modern master György Ligeti. Fisk joins the Arditti for the culminating performance of the evening: a brand-new quintet for strings and guitar written for these musicians by the German composer Wolfgang Rihm.

Program

Eliot Fisk proved once more that he is a connoisseur’s guitarist. His programming is invariably imaginative, his technique effortless ... if you didn’t know better, you’d think playing the guitar was easy.