by Daniel Hathaway
Most often, ensembles hosted by the Cleveland Chamber Music Society are on tour and get picked up and dropped off at Cleveland Hopkins Airport. But for their April 28 performance at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Verona Quartet were able to avoid all the vagaries of modern air travel — TSA searches, lost luggage, hassles over transporting cellos, and the inevitable flight delays.
Based at Oberlin Conservatory, where the Verona are the resident quartet, they were only 45 minutes away by car from the concert venue, where they joined pianist Yaron Kohlberg in a fascinating program of works by Alessandro Scarlatti, Phillip Glass, Leoš Janaček, and Antonín Dvořák — not your usual three-course string quartet menu.
In their debut album Diffusion, the Verona Quartet celebrates folk music’s influence on string quartet language at the beginning of the 20th century — a style that reflects their values as an international ensemble with members hailing from all across the globe.
If you had to guess the composers of two of the pieces performed by the Wasmuth Quartet on January 6 by sound alone, you would almost certainly guess wrong. As part of Oberlin Conservatory’s Chamber Music Intensive & Festival, the young string quartet presented music by Haydn, Webern, and Ligeti in Kulas Recital Hall, but probably not the Ligeti or Webern you would easily recognize.