Argus String Quartet to perform on September 22, 2019
Steeple Concerts at St. Paul’s will present the Argus String Quartet at 5:00 pm on Sunday, September 22, in a program of music ranging from the 18th to the 21st centuries. As seen in the exciting program planned for the Westfield concert, the quartet is dedicated to celebrating the artistic landscape of our time by drawing unexpected connections across styles and centuries in order to foster community amongst performers, audiences, and composers alike. The concert will be performed at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 414 East Broad Street, Westfield, NJ. Free parking is available in the parking lot adjacent to the church or on St. Paul’s Street on the south side of the church.
The Argus Quartet has quickly acquired an impressive reputation since its founding in Los Angeles in 2013. They have performed at many prestigious venues, including Carnegie’s Weill and Zankel Halls, Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, and the Ravinia Festival. Highlights of the 2019-20 season include debut performances for Washington Performing Arts at the Kennedy Center and Lincoln Center’s Great Performers series.
The program opens in the Baroque era with selections from The Art of the Fugue by Johann Sebastian Bach. The program then moves to a composition by the contemporary composer Juri Seo, a Guggenheim Fellowship winner on the music faculty at Princeton University, and the Cavatina from String Quartet, Op. 130, by Ludwig van Beethoven. Winter-Spring, by Seo, captures the turbulent changes of weather at the end of winter. The main musical motive comes from a simple two-note call of black-capped chickadees. In May 2019, the quartet released a recording of Seo’s works for string quartet on Innova Recordings. The second half of the program similarly contrasts Curiosity Cabinet, a short work for four strings by the contemporary Norwegian composer Rolf Wallin, with the 19th-century String Quartet No. 1 by the Czech composer Bedřich Smetana.
Individual tickets to the concert are $25 for adults and $10 for students. Adult subscriptions to the full season of five concerts are priced at $100, with student subscriptions at $40. Season subscriptions, as well as tickets to individual concerts and details about upcoming concerts, are available on the Steeple Concerts website at www.steepleconcerts.org. Steeple Concerts at St. Paul’s is presented by the Friends of Music, a 501(c)3 organization devoted to presenting the arts in Westfield.
Join us on September 22 as we kick off an exciting season of music on Sunday evenings in Westfield!