by Mike Telin
Since winning the grand prize and three special prizes at the 2013 Banff International String Quartet Competition, the Dover Quartet — Joel Link and Bryan Lee, violins, Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt, viola, and Camden Shaw, cello — have quickly risen to the forefront of young, internationally touring string quartets. Following that 2013 breakthrough, the ensemble has added to their resume a Cleveland Quartet Award, a Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award, and most recently an Avery Fisher Career Grant.
On Tuesday, February 13 at 7:30 pm at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights, the Dover Quartet will return to the Cleveland Chamber Music Society stage with a program that will include Mozart’s Quartet in d, K. 421, Schoenberg’s Quartet in D, and Zemlinsky’s Quartet No. 2. Tickets are available online.
Life is good for classical guitarist 
While Sergei Prokofiev’s third piano concerto receives more than its fair share of visits to the concert stage, and even his first concerto makes appearances from time to time, what about the composer’s second concerto — why does it languish in obscurity?
“I can look at all four symphonies of Brahms and say, ‘Oh that one is my favorite.’ Then I think, ‘No this one is,’” conductor Daniel Hege said during a recent telephone conversation. “But I have so much admiration for the Second Symphony. It has a lot of passion and emotional power all the way through, including a brilliant finish.”
Debra Nagy and her colleagues of Les Délices usually dedicate themselves to bringing the music of 17th- and 18th-century France alive for modern ears. But this weekend, the period instrument ensemble will push the clock back to the 14th century — not an era of powdered wigs and salons, but a time of knights, crusades, courtly love, and increasing secularization.