Iconoclasts: Flouting Conventions: Left Bank Quartet in Concert

This program features three of history’s great musical minds who each in their own way blazed new trails dragging music history along with them. Performing together all of Stravinsky’s string quartet oeuvre, started fresh after the riotous fallout from his Rite of Spring, begs the question: is this modernist only just a Neo-Classicist?  Mozart while respecting his rich Classical traditions mightily expands the scope of his statements in his last years heard vividly in this quintet where his imagination is no longer constrained by merely the four basic voices. Perhaps it was Beethoven’s very deafness that enabled him to let his creativity offend the ears of his time—leaping ahead with this still contemporary-sounding Great Fuge—in what many experts feel is “the first composition of the 20th Century!”