In a piece titled, “Grammy-winning Quartet Goes Deep at Winona Festival,” Minneapolis Star Tribune writer Terry Blain gives a spirited review of the Parker Quartet’s performance at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum as part of the Minnesota Beethoven Festival.
The Parker Quartet, who won a grammy for Best Chamber Music Performance in 2011 with their, Ligeti: String Quartets Nos. 1 & 2, wowed a local audience with a stunning performance in front of a Mississippi River backdrop on Friday, July 19th.
Blain writes, “Their accumulated experience cut through palpably in a performance of riveting structural clarity and uncompromising frankness of expression.” The Quartet performed Beethoven’s second “Razumovsky” – a challenging piece that they first explored during their formation in 2002. Indeed, the group’s handling of this piece appears to have won over this critic, who writes, “It’s tempting to round off sharp corners in the second “Razumovsky” and tame the sometimes wildly speculative questions it asks about the expressive parameters of the string quartet format. The Parker Quartet resisted simplification, however. The jerky, inconclusive rhythms of the Allegretto movement were etched with the sharpness of a draftsman’s pencil…”
The quartet opened the performance with Beethoven’s Op. 18, No. 6 Quartet, which also drew friendly words from Blain, who says, “The opening movement had both a tensile energy and a sense of elegance, showing again how skillfully the Parker Quartet accommodates potentially contradictory elements in Beethoven’s music.”
Now in its 13th year, the Minnesota Beethoven Festival has become one of the elite Classical Music festivals in the country, bringing world-class performers to Winona.
Read more about the festival here
Take a look at the Star Tribune article here