by Daniel Hathaway
The Jerusalem String Quartet, now beginning its 24th season together, will give the second concert of the 70th season of the Cleveland Chamber Music Society at Plymouth Church on Tuesday October 22 at 7:30 pm. Their program includes works by Mozart, Korngold, and Shostakovich.
One of CCMS’s most frequently-invited ensembles, the Jerusalem Quartet has visited the series once a year since 2017, and once every other year from 2010 through 2015. In addition to Cleveland, the ensemble’s U.S. tours this season will include concerts in Houston, Durham, Baltimore, West Orange New Jersey, and New York, and a return to Boston’s Celebrity Series.
The Quartet’s program on October 22 begins with Mozart’s Quartet in d, K. 421, one of the set of six quartets the composer dedicated to his mentor, Joseph Haydn. For someone who normally composed rapidly and with little effort — Mozart’s sister noted that he often concocted whole pieces in his head while playing games, then sat down and simply wrote them out — these works inspired the composer to produce music at a level of perfection unusual even for him. [Read more…]
“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.” 
Armed with both a new first violinist, Areta Zhulla, and a new piece by Lembit Beecher, the Juilliard String Quartet will head to Plymouth Church 