Duke Arts Presents: Schumann Quartett

Three brothers named "Schumann," joined by violist Veit Hertenstein, turned a family pastime into an internationally acclaimed quartet. "Fire and energy. The Schumann Quartett plays staggeringly well...without doubt one of the very best formations among today's abundance of quartets, with virtuosity and a willingness to astonish" (Süddeutsche Zeitung).

"We really want to take things to extremes, to see how far the excitement and our spontaneity as a group take us," says Ken Schumann. The concert gets underway with a late masterpiece by Haydn, the "father of the string quartet," before taking a left turn into a marvelous rarity, the String Quartet No. 2 by Charles Ives. An early 20th-century American masterwork, the Ives Quartet conjures a political argument between four bullheaded personalities while skipping through popular American folk songs. To close the evening, the Schumann players probe a more intimate side of Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in his String Quartet No. 1.