Top 10 Reasons to Buy Tickets for the Calidore Quartet’s Beethoven Cycle

1. It’s Ludwig van Beethoven’s 250th birthday. Of course, all composers have birthdays, but how many of them have been celebrated by Schroeder in the Peanuts comic strip? Bach, Mozart and Stravinsky are magnificent composers, but most of the people who remember their birthdays have advanced degrees in music. Beethoven’s birthday, like Shakespeare’s birthday, is an occasion celebrated around the world, like St. Patrick’s Day, Cinco de Mayo and New Year’s Eve.
2. Beethoven’s 16 quartets are widely acknowledged to be the finest, movement for movement and phrase for phrase, ever written. If you’ve never heard a string quartet before, or if you’ve zoned out every time you heard one in the background, you owe it to yourself to experience his quartets at least once because they’re the perfect introduction to one of music’s most enduring forms. The only downside is that every other quartet you hear for the rest of your life may be a disappointment.
3. Listening to Beethoven’s quartets invokes a whole world. Brahms’s Piano Quintet, which the Calidore Quartet tossed into its second program so that they could play it for a home-field audience (with the gifted pianist Pavel Kolesnikov as the world’s most monumental bonus piece), makes five players sound like an orchestra; Beethoven’s C-sharp minor quartet makes four players synonymous with a universe.
4. Even more than his symphonies or piano sonatas, which have plenty of boosters of their own, Beethoven’s quartets give you an unrivaled view of his career because they span virtually his entire working life. The six early quartets, written when he was in his 20s, might be described as Bad Boy Haydn if Haydn, Beethoven’s teacher, hadn’t so often been a bad boy himself when it came to the playing with the form he basically invented. The five middle quartets are Beethoven’s most extroverted, free-wheeling and emotionally accessible, even when the emotion is anger, as it is in most of Op. 95. Each one of the five late quartets, written at the very end of Beethoven’s life, years after the increasingly deaf composer had lost his ability to hear his music played, is a profound, otherworldly, one-of-a-kind experience that’s otherwise indescribable.
5. Since every one of the Calidore’s six programs mixes early, middle and late quartets, each program becomes a window into Beethoven’s spiritual autobiography. Even if you’ve already missed the first two programs, you still have plenty of time to hear all four programs in 2020, the year when Beethoven actually turns 200, and come away feeling that you climbed the mountain along with the composer and the performers.
6. When the Calidore plays Beethoven, it’s a perfect meeting of performers and material. The four members of the Calidore all produce distinctive, shapely voices it’s easy to focus on and follow if you like, but their ensemble is faultless, especially in their shifts in tempo and volume and their fiery attacks on the amazing, unpredictable developments Beethoven specializes in. The only rough spots in their performances are the ones the composer himself has written into the score.
7. Calidore is at an ideal moment in their development to play the Beethoven cycle. Its four players—violinists Jeffrey Myers and Ryan Meehan, violist Jeremy Berry, and cellist Estelle Choi—have been together for 10 years, long enough to predict and react to each other’s every note and gesture, but not so long that they’ve gotten bored with the music and each other and are just phoning in their performances.
8. It’s true that you can hear other Beethoven quartet cycles this year as close as Philadelphia and New York. But you don’t need to make a trip to these cities or compete with the traffic inside them to hear the Calidore. Their performances are at Gore Recital Hall on the UD campus. Student tickets are $5. Seniors and UD faculty, staff, and alumni pay $10. The rest of the world has to pony up $15. Ask your friends in Philly and the Big Apple how much they’re paying to hear the Beethoven quartets.
9. The first two of the Calidore’s six programs sold out. Given the word of mouth about these extraordinary performances of this extraordinary music, it would be wildly optimistic to expect to walk into any of the remaining four programs at the last minute and expect to be seated. It would be an exceptionally smart move to buy tickets the moment they’re available (which happens to be now).
10. If you miss this Beethoven cycle, you’ll probably have to wait till at least 2027, the 200th anniversary of the composer’s death, to hear another one. If you do come out, though, you’ll be able to brag to everyone at Beethoven’s 300th birthday festivities in 2070 that you heard the Calidore play these quartets. Trust me: They’ll all be envious.

 Thomas Leitch
Professor of English

​February 21, 2020

Friday, March 6, 2020

Friday, April 17, 2020

Saturday, May 9, 2020