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Duke Arts Presents

Ciompi Concert No. 4 featuring Gerard McBurney, Narrator

Saturday, April 1, 2017 | 8:00 pm

Baldwin Auditorium


The Ciompi finish their season with a panoramic view of Beethoven’s seminal string quartets. They start where the composer started, with his String Quartet No. 3, the first he composed. Jumping nearly thirty years to the pinnacle of Beethoven’s quartet writing, they take on his complex and wildly experimental Quartet in C-sharp Minor. Robert Schumann marveled that this monumental work stands “on the extreme boundary of all that has hitherto been attained by human art and imagination.” Your navigator for the journey is British composer and scholar Gerard McBurney, whom the Chicago Tribune called “the sort of musical tour guide we haven’t heard much of in this country since Leonard Bernstein.”

 

Program

Beethoven: String Quartet in D Major, op. 18, no. 3
Beethoven: String Quartet in C-sharp Minor, op. 131



Ciompi Quartet

From String Quartet in C Major, Op. 76 #3 - Allegro - Franz Josef Haydn

Ciompi Quartet

A short documentary

Ciompi Quartet

Tristan and Isolde


[The Ciompi inhabit] music-making of remarkable poise and control.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer