String Quartet

There's music everywhere you turn this weekend. Here are just two of the many events worth checking out: The Chiara String Quartet, which has been making a name for itself since being formed in 1993, will offer an appealing program on the Evergreen Carriage House Concert Series. There will be a rare performance of Charles Ives' Quartet No. 1, along with Beethoven's Op. 18, No. 3, and Debussy's indelible String Quartet. The concert is at 8 p.m. tomorrow at Evergreen, 4545 N. Charles St. Tickets are $15. Call 410-516-0341.

You can expect the music to sound fresh during the Leipzig String Quartet's concert on Saturday, March 2, at 8 p.m., in Howard Community College's Smith Theatre. Like the sponsoring Candlelight Concert Society, this chamber music quartet often likes to introduce audiences to contemporary classical music. The only 19th-century piece on the upcoming program is Brahms' Quartet in A minor, Op. 51, No. 2. If that selection by a great German composer seems like a natural choice for a quartet hailing from Leipzig, the rest of the program features much more recently minted music from around the world.

Candlelight Concert Society will present the award-winning St. Lawrence String Quartet at 8 p.m. Saturday in its first Family Night Concert at Howard Community College's Smith Theatre.The quartet features Geoff Nuttall and Barry Shiffman on violin, Lesley Robertson on viola and Marina Hoover on cello.The quartet won the Banff International String Quartet Competition and the 1992 Young Concert Artists International Auditions. It was also the Juilliard School's Graduate String Quartet-in-Residence for 1992-93.

In classical music terms, one quartet plus one quartet equals an octet. You can hear that mathematical formula for yourself when the American String Quartet is joined by the Ariel String Quartet for a Candlelight Concert Society program on Saturday, Jan. 28 at 8 p.m. in Howard Community College's Smith Theatre. Actually, most of the program is devoted to the American String Quartet performing on its own. This venerable ensemble will have no problem occupying the stage. Formed in 1974 by musicians who were students at New York's Juilliard School, the group got off to a fast start when it won the Naumburg Chamber Music Award and Coleman Competition.

A series of free lectures will help prepare audiences for the inaugural New Chamber Festival Baltimore, an extraordinary three-day sampling of the past 100 years or so of string quartet repertoire starting June 20. The lectures, given by popular Peabody Institute professor and composer Elam Ray Sprenkle, will be held on three consecutive Tuesdays, beginning this Tuesday. Sprenkle will look at the evolution of string quartet writing in the 20th century. The first topic is "1890-1914: The Decline of the Common Practice, or the `Big Crack-Up.

The Shriver Hall Concert Series opened Saturday night with the Tokyo String Quartet, and the near-capacity audience was given three flawless performances by an ensemble that is without doubt cementing its place in the pantheon of the great quartets.The unity of the ensemble conjures comparisons to such groups the Quartetto Italiano, Juilliard String Quartet and the Budapest String Quartet. This is the quartet's 25th season, and like a fine wine it has aged to perfection. The two-hours-plus program was spellbinding.

The Alexander String Quartet, one of the country's most accomplished chamber ensembles, comes to Key Auditorium at St. John's College tomorrow for a free 8: 15 p.m. concert. The quartet has performed in the musical capitals of four continents since its founding in 1981. In its second year, the San Francisco-based group became the first string quartet to win the Concert Artists Guild award. By the mid-1980s, it had become the first American quartet to win first prize and the audience prize at London's International String Quartet Competition, where the group's Beethoven was blessed by the late Yehudi Menuhin.

Certain occasions lead one to the suspicion -- artistically, at least -- that the second half of the 20th century does not measure up to the first. One took place yesterday when the Boston Composers String Quartet -- violinists Clayton Hoener and Sue Rabut-Cartwright, violist Scott Woolweaver and cellist Reinmar Seidler -- performed an afternoon of string quartets in the Chamber Music Society of Baltimore series at the Baltimore Museum of Art.First on...

For those who wish to have a very un-Halloween-like evening, the Candlelight Concert Society may offer the appropriate setting.The critically praised Emerson String Quartet will perform at Howard Community College's Smith Theatre Oct. 31 -- an alternative to doorbells, bite-size candy and bar soap.The Candlelight Concert Society must be commended for having such a strong schedule of performances early in its 20th season.Last Saturday the Waverly Consort performed music from the time of Christopher Columbus during the week of the quincentenary of Columbus' arrival in America.

WESTMINSTER HALL was nearly full yesterday afternoon for the Baltimore String Quartet's season opening concert. This concert, originally scheduled for October, had been delayed due to microsurgery on violist Mary Zinman's finger. She has recovered and, happily, the concert was worth waiting for.Opening with Mozart's Quartet in D Major (K. 155), the group quickly displayed its warm yet crystalline sound. Violinists Herbert Greenberg and Joseph Bykov, along with Zinman, and cellist Yuri Sher projected the sweetly extroverted melodies of this three-movement work.

The easiest part of forming a string quartet may be finding four good musicians. Much trickier is finding players who can get along with one another, on- and offstage. Michael Hollinger's absorbing and often funny 2006 play "Opus," which has been given a taut production at the Olney Theatre Center, examines a fictional ensemble from the inside out. The Lazara Quartet is in crisis mode as the work opens. The original violist, Dorian, has been fired by the other members, and there isn't much time to regroup before a televised concert at the White House.

Halloween Hootenanny When it comes to Halloween and rock and roll, two names come quickly to mind — and aren't we lucky they're playing together Sunday at Merriweather? Alice Cooper, of course, has been playing fright rock for years — with an album called "Welcome to My Nightmare," you know he'd be a welcome guest at any haunted house. And even though he's been concentrating on films more in recent years, Rob Zombie has been freaking out music fans since his days fronting White Zombie.

Jonathan Leshnoff's Violin Concerto struck me as a major addition to the repertoire when I first heard it in 2006. I'm even more convinced of that quality, having revisited the work on an all-Leshnoff CD from the Naxos label that features violinist Charles Wetherbee and the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Markand Thakar. Leshnoff, a Towson University faculty member whose international career has been developing rapidly, found inspiration for the concerto in a chilling tale he heard from a Holocaust survivor - how inmates, forced by SS guards to sing Nazi propaganda songs, subtly wove prayers into the music.

When the Prague-based Pavel Haas Quartet performs Czech classical music in Howard County this weekend, it continues the mission begun by composers Dvorak and Janacek to bring their lyrical folk-inspired national music to a wider international audience. Sponsored by Candlelight Concerts, the quartet will present music by Smetana, Dvorak, and Janacek at 7:30 p.m. tomorrow at the Wilde Lake Interfaith Center. The Pavel Haas Quartet (Veronika Jaruskova and Maria Fuxova, violins; Pavel Nikl, viola; and Peter Jarusek, cello)

In this primary season, politicians seeking to establish a broadly appealing, post-partisan identity might take their cue from ensembles such as the Enso String Quartet. Following a century in which the politics of musical style often dictated the aesthetic direction of composers and musicians, the Enso Quartet is among a growing number of chamber groups devoted not to any style or period, but simply to good music, superbly played. Co-founded in 1999 at Yale University by violinist Maureen Nelson and cellist Richard Belcher, the Enso Quartet has since been joined by violinist John Marcus and violist Melissa Reardon.

As part of the Candlelight Concert Series' outreach program, two free concerts by the Enso String Quartet will be offered at two Howard County senior centers Friday. A performance at the Glenwood Senior Center begins at 10:30 a.m, a performance at the Bain Center at 1 p.m. Information: 410-313-7213. Program on teen financial literacy "Sound Cents," a program on teen financial literacy, will be offered from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday at the Glenwood branch library, 2350 Route 97, Cooksville.

Generations of beginner musicians have played "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" in front of proud parents at their first concerts, but Sunday a quartet of skilled young violinists plan to give their audience a surprising and challenging version of the amateur recital staple. The Sundays At Three concert series at Christ Episcopal Church in Columbia will feature four Howard County students performing Charles Dancla's Ah! Vous dirai-je, Maman, which contains technically challenging, lively and surprising variations on the well-known children's tune.

The string quartet has long served as a kind of laboratory for composers. Beginning with Haydn, Mozart and, most notably, Beethoven, the medium has offered them something that the large forces of the symphony orchestra could not: a concentrated yet versatile means to explore new musical terrain. For those composers who have revisited the genre throughout their careers, each quartet encapsulates a particular moment in their stylistic development. At 8 p.m. tomorrow, the Alexander String Quartet will perform four early quartets by 20th-century composers on the Candlelight Concert Series at Howard Community College's Smith Theatre.