by Daniel Hathaway
In 2022, the Barcelona-based Cuarteto Casals was forced by a medical emergency to interrupt their rhythm of every-other-year performances on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series. Happily, they returned in fine fettle on November 12 at Disciples Church with a program of Mozart, Gubaidulina, and Brahms — and with a new violist.
Cristina Cordero replaced Jonathan Brown at the beginning of the current season, seamlessly joining violinists Abel Tomàs and Vera Martinez Mehner and cellist Arnau Tomàs in the ensemble that was founded at the Escuela Reina Sofia in Madrid in 1997.
Blindfolded, you could almost convince yourself that you were hearing three different string quartets during this sensitively-played program, so masterfully did the Cuarteto adapt its tone and approach to suit the three works on the agenda. [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.” 
The program might have looked conventional, but Cuarteto Casals’ performances of string quartets by Haydn, Shostakovich, and Beethoven on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society series last Tuesday at Plymouth Church were exceptional. Every piece shone with its own individual character, contributing many-hued elements to an outstanding whole. 
The Barcelona-based Cuarteto Casals will continue the Cleveland Chamber Music Society’s 66th season at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights on Tuesday, October 27 at 7:30 pm with a program of string quartets by Joseph Haydn, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Ludwig van Beethoven.
