To celebrate their twentieth anniversary, the Brentano String Quartet embarked on Fragments: Connecting Past and Present, an ambitious project to build a bridge between the great composers of yesterday with some of the best of the 20th century. The project was co-commissioned by Da Camera of Houston and features new works that contemporary composers wrote in reaction to unfinished music by Schubert, Bach and Mozart, among others.
Bruce Adolphe, for example, worked with Schubert’s Quartettsatz in C minor and Andante (unfinished); building on those musical themes, Adolphe wrote Fra(nz)gmentate. In a video about the composition posted online, Adolphe says he’s unsurprised that Schubert would leave pieces that seemed viable incomplete. “To write a nice melody for Schubert was so easy,” says Adolphe, “that the fact that he would abandon a melody is trivial. It’s like not finishing your breakfast. Why didn’t you finish your sausages?…I guess he was full.” 7:30 p.m. 1515 Sul Ross. For information, call 713-524-5050 or visit www.dacamera.org. $35.
Tue., Dec. 6, 2011
This article appears in Dec 1-7, 2011.