by Mike Telin
“To live with this piece is to imagine a genius at the absolute height of his powers, yet virtually isolated from the world,” Cuarteto Casals violist Jonathan Brown said. “Beethoven was deaf in his disorderly room in Vienna where few people wanted to be associated with him. There he was struggling with his artistic demons. He wrote, and rewrote this quartet extensively, but he was working with his own criteria — there’s no other model, there’s no other work like this.”
On Tuesday, March 5 at 7:30 pm at Plymouth Church, Jonathan Brown will join his Cuarteto Casals colleagues (Abel Tomàs and Vera Martínez, violins, and Arnau Tomàs, cello) for a performance of Beethoven’s monumental Quartet in c-sharp, Op. 131.
As the month of Valentines Day and love, February is abundant with hearts and couples of all kinds. The Admiral Launch Duo’s new album 
At the midpoint of its 51st season, The West Shore Chorale will sing a program on the Helen D. Schubert concert series at St. John’s Cathedral on Friday, March 1 at 7:30 pm. John Drotleff, who has conducted the Rocky River-based chorus since 1984, will lead his singers and an instrumental ensemble in music by Mozart, David Conte, and Bernstein.
François-Xavier Roth could certainly be called versatile, though there might be a better term for him. His orchestra Les Siècles, which he founded in 2003, harbors a collection of instruments spanning the Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and modern eras, matching instruments with the appropriate repertoire. With all of that at his fingertips, maybe Roth would describe himself as a kind of musical scientist, always looking to experiment.
Some authors pull material from their own experiences. Others are fascinated by things that are totally foreign to them. If you had to guess, which of those types describes the writer of 