This November, Co-Artistic Director Owen Dalby joins three of the most exciting string players working today for an afternoon built around one of chamber music's most elemental forces: the string quartet. The program places three very different composers in conversation: Bay Area native Gabriella Smith, whose Carrot Revolution grooves and pulsates with the sounds of the 21st century—early music strains meeting bluegrass, jazz, rock, and post-minimalist energy in a patchwork of wildly contrasting influences; Schnittke's Third Quartet, perhaps the supreme example of his polystylism, which opens with a breathtaking collision of three borrowed worlds—a phrase from Orlando di Lasso's Stabat Mater, the theme of the Grosse Fuge, and Shostakovich's personal musical monogram, DSCH—all within the first eight bars; and Beethoven's Op. 130, completed with the Grosse Fuge itself—the work that haunts Schnittke's quartet like a specter, heard here finally in full. This is the magic of string quartet as laboratory, as social form, as metaphor for what this community does best: listen deeply to one another and make something that none of us could make alone.

Featuring Alexi Kenney and Owen Dalby, violin, Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt, viola, and Oliver Herbert, ‘cello.