“The more I play Beethoven, especially his symphonies and string quartets, the affinity as a teenager I felt for him as the unruly rebel in an old picture on my bedroom wall becomes an affinity with his uncompromising nature and the complete humanity of his composition. It’s always a special thrill to play a program containing a Beethoven quartet and it will be twice the thrill to play this program containing two! Opus 135, his last quartet, is especially close to my heart.

It’s often said that this last quartet was the beginning of a new period for Beethoven but we’ll never know for sure. It certainly is quite different from the “late” quartets that preceded it. To begin the concert, Beethoven’s joyous and playful Opus 18 No. 6 quartet is paired with a harmonic distillation of and homage to it by the currently very popular American composer, Caroline Shaw.”

~ Wilma Smith, Violin