The Rishonim String Quartet – comprised of violinists Yaron Prensky and Dotan Netel, violist Irit Livne and cellist Raz Cohen – will be the stars of Sunday’s Noon Concert at the Open University. Take a midday break and enjoy two beautiful chamber works: Beethoven’s String Quartet in A minor and Hugo Wolf’s “Italian Serenade“, along with an introduction of each work by musicologist Anat Sharon.
The String Quartet in A Minor (No. 15, opus 132) was written in 1825, near the end of Beethoven’s life, after he had suffered a bout of ill health. He had moved to Baden, a suburb of Vienna, for his convalescence. By this point he was entirely deaf and suffering from intense bouts of pain; still, he managed to write a number string quartets that year.
The A minor is the second string quartet Beethoven wrote for Count Nicolai Galitzin, an amateur cellist and one of the composer’s biggest fans. The diversity between each of the quartet’s five movements and the emotion each one conveys continue to fascinate musicians and listeners to this day – particularly the slow third movement, called Heiliger Dankgesang, or “Holy Song of Thanks”.
Hugo Wolf’s Italian Serenade in G major, written in 1887 over the course of three days. He was working on a musical setting of poems by the German Romantic poet Joseph Eichendorff, and was inspired by an Italian serenade described in a novella by Eichendorff. It’s a short work in one movement, possibly based on an old Italian tune.
The concert will be held tomorrow, Sunday November 3, at 13:00 at the Chais Auditorium on the Open University campus (1 University Road, Ra’anana).
Tickets cost only 25 NIS and can be ordered by phone at *3337 or 03-5114412, or via website (in Hebrew): http://www.openu.ac.il/noonconcert2.
