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Celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, the Alexander String Quartet opens Lafayette’s Chamber Music Series 8 p.m. Friday, Sept. 8 at the Williams Center for the Arts. The Beethoven-focused program will feature works from Ops. 59 and 18.
Tickets for the performance are free for Lafayette students, $4 for faculty and staff, and $20 for the public, and may be obtained by calling the Williams Center for the Arts box office at (610) 330-5009.
Other performers in the Chamber Music Series include Musicians in Ordinary Wednesday, Oct. 4, $15; Orpheus with Jeremy Denk: Brandenburg Redux Wednesday, Nov. 29, $27; Orpheus with Ian Bostridge: Serenades Sunday, Feb. 4, $27; Ying Quartet Tuesday, March 6, $18; and Christopher Taylor Tuesday, April 3, $18. A subscription to the Chamber Music Series costs $109, a savings of 13 percent off the single ticket price. Tickets are $30 for a non-subscription Mozart Celebration performance by Orpheus with Emanuel Ax Tuesday, Oct. 10.
The Alexander String Quartet also will headline a free program 8 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 7 in tribute to the 100th anniversary of Dmitri Shostakovich’s birth (Sept. 23, 1906). They will perform excerpts from Shostakovich’s quartets from different periods in his career, extending from the World War II era to the Soviet repression of arts and culture in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Lafayette faculty and special guests will present readings from the composer’s letters and commentary by critics to provide historical context.
During its 25-year career, the Alexander String Quartet has performed all over the world, gaining wide admiration for its interpretations of Beethoven, Mozart, and Shostakovich, along with its advocacy of new music through commissions and premieres. The San Francisco Chronicle calls them “terrific of tone, virtuosity and balance. The general quality level, as well as all the particulars of communicative virtuosity, place the Alexander Quartet right up there with the best on today’s international scene.”
The 2006–2007 Lafayette College Performance Series is supported in part by gifts from Friends of the Williams Center for the Arts; by provisions of the Josephine Chidsey Williams Endowment, Alan and Wendy Pesky Artist-in-Residence Program, James Bradley Fund, and Ed Brunswick Jazz Fund; and by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Pennsylvania Performing Arts on Tour, F.M. Kirby Foundation, Dexter and Dorothy Baker Foundation, and New England Foundation for the Arts.