Minnesota Beethoven Festival: Dover Quartet

Hear the performance by The Dover Quartet, who made their Minnesota Beethoven Festival debut on Tuesday, July 18, 2017.

Joel Link is their first violinist, and he says he loves the size of this ensemble — not as lonely as being a soloist and not as lost as in a symphony orchestra, and yet he always has to strike a balance of the two in a quartet:

"It's always an important bartering process about how much you get to be in the forefront for something and making sure that someone doesn't feel like they're just playing an accompaniment to you even if you have the main line, making sure that everyone feels heard, but there's also a sense of order and hierarchy in terms of what's most important to be heard in the moment."

The Dover Quartet have been called the "young American string quartet of the moment" and that's because they're awesome. They've won nearly every major chamber music competition, and in 2013, they swept every prize in Banff. That international competition win assured their practically meteoric rise to the top of the international music scene. But as Joel points out, playing in a quartet is a balancing act. There's no conductor. It's all democratic — meaning every decision is made by the four members: e.g. balance, tempo, style, timbre — and maybe most importantly — what is the most important thing to be heard in the moment.

But the really great thing about the string quartet in general is that there is so much music to play — a vast repertoire beginning with Haydn and continuing to be written even as we speak. That's what makes playing in a quartet so appealing to the musicians, but also to listen to even if getting through all that music might not be possible in one lifetime. As Joel Link says:

"Spending your entire life playing string quartets doesn't give you enough time to do all of them that are great justice so we feel a certain amount of responsibility in programming and picking pieces we know we're really excited about and want to be playing throughout the course of a year because our lives aren't endless."

And what great repertoire they picked for you for the Minnesota Beethoven Festival: one of Mozart's masterful Prussian quartets that features the cello prominently, likely for the first time ever; the first work written by the leader of the Auschwitz Orchestra when he was liberated from the camp, a stunningly noble and moving quartet by Simone Laks; and finally, one of the late quartets by Beethoven, a piece so far ahead of its time that it still leaves us breathless with its intricacy and depth.

Why should you listen to this concert? Here's what Joel link has to say:

"It's exciting, it's dramatic, and something that just allows you to kind of get away from the busy-ness of the every day and bask in this beautiful music that we're so lucky to have. "

Concert Program

Mozart: Quartet No. 23 in F major, K. 590
Laks: Quartet No. 3
Beethoven: Quartet No. 13 in B-flat major, Op 130, with Grosse Fuge, Op. 133

Resources

Dover Quartet - official site

Dover Quartet, Tribute (debut album) - Amazon