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Concert is the final performance in this year’s Chamber Music Series
Lafayette welcomes Grammy-winning Emerson String Quartet to the Williams Center at 8 p.m. Wednesday, April 9. This will be the season’s final performance in the Chamber Music Series.
Tickets are free for students, $4 for faculty and staff, and $22 for the public. They can be obtained by calling the Williams Center box office at (610) 330-5009.
The Emerson String Quartet delivers an unequaled mixed repertory of exceptionally stylish performances from cycles of Beethoven, Bartok, and Shostakovich. The selected program for this performance spans an entire century of music bridging four assorted cultural worlds, ordered by geography and history. The quartet will introduce audiences to musical landscapes of the early 20th century Czech Republic and Hungary and on through the Baltic States and Finland in later years.
The works will be: Quartet No. 7 in F-sharp minor, Op. 108 by Dmitri Shostakovich, Quartet No. 3 by Bohuslav Martinu, Quartet No. 2, “Intimate Letters” by Leos Jan�cek, Terra Memoria by Kaija Saariaho, and Quartet No. 3 by B�la Bart�k.
Acclaimed for its insightful performances, dynamic artistry and technical mastery, the Emerson String Quartet has amassed an impressive list of achievements: a brilliant series of recordings exclusively documented by Deutsche Grammophon since 1987; eight Grammy Awards including two for Best Classical Album; three Gramophone Magazine Awards, and performances of the complete cycles of Beethoven, Bart�k and Shostakovich quartets in major concert halls throughout the world.
For three decades, the group has collaborated with such artists as Emanuel Ax, Misha Dichter, Leon Fleisher, the Guarneri String Quartet, Thomas Hampson, Lynn Harrell, Barbara Bonney, Barbara Hendricks, the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio, Paul McCartney, Menahem Pressler, David Shifrin, Richard Stoltzman and the late Mstislav Rostropovich, Isaac Stern and Oscar Shumsky.
The group’s 2007-2008 season comprises over 80 worldwide engagements, with a particular focus on Europe. In August and September of 2007, the quartet appeared at the festivals of Gstaad, Salzburg, Schwarzenberg, Merano, Ascona, Copenhagen, Cologne and Stockholm. The quartet returns to Europe throughout the season, with additional concerts in Spain, Austria, France, the UK, Germany and Italy. The quartet’s North American tours include stops in San Francisco, Stanford, Portland, Dallas, Philadelphia, Ann Arbor, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, San Diego, Vancouver, Scottsdale, Savannah and Houston.
The Emerson String Quartet continues its residency at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, now in its 28th sold-out season, and appears in New York with pianist Gilbert Kalish for Lincoln Center’s Great Performers and with pianist Yefim Bronfman at Carnegie Hall.
The 2007-2008 Performance Series at Lafayette College is supported in part by gifts from Friends of the Williams Center for the Arts; by provisions of the Josephine Chidsey Williams Endowment, J. Mahlon and Grace Buck Fund, the Croasdale Fund, the Class of ’73 Fund, the Alan and Wendy Pesky Artist-in-Residence Program, the James Bradley Fund, and the 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; the F.M. Kirby Foundation, the Dexter and Dorothy Baker Foundation, and the New England Foundation for the Arts.