Carnegie Hall

Celebrate the Carnegie Hall debut of the Balourdet Quartet, winners of Chamber Music America’s 2024 Cleveland Quartet Award. Bartók’s String Quartet No. 3 is edgy and kinetic, the most succinctly impactful of his game-changing works in the form. Ravel’s String Quartet is the composer’s sole foray into the genre, a work of lasting brilliance and immense popularity. Brahms’s String Quartet No. 3 was written as a way to escape the emotional burden of his first symphony. He soon dismissed it as a “useless trifle,” an act of avoidance—but it should instead be seen as an invaluable window into a lighter, more free-spirited side of a famously self-deprecating genius.