Brentano String Quartet Illuminates Haydn, Bartók & Dvořák at 92NY
There are concerts, and then there are consecrations—moments in which music reveals not only its architecture but its inner life. Such was the case when the Brentano String Quartet—Mark Steinberg (violin), Serena Canin (violin), Misha Amory (viola), and Nina Lee (cello)—returned to 92NY on the David Geffen Stage at the Kaufmann Concert Hall for an evening of string quartets by Franz Joseph Haydn, Béla Bartók, and Antonín Dvořák.
A transcendent evening on the David Geffen Stage at the Kaufmann Concert Hall
To program three quartets is already to signal seriousness of purpose; after all, as Donald Francis Tovey and Hans Keller both insisted, the string quartet is the composer’s ultimate proving ground, the place where technique stands without ornamentation, the soul without disguise. The Brentano, true to their reputation as one of the most intellectually probing and musically refined ensembles performing today, approached the challenge not as curators but as illuminators, uncovering the spiritual threads that bind these works across centuries.
Brentano String Quartet. Photo by Jurgen Frank
The Brentano Legacy: A Tradition of Excellence
Since their founding in 1992, the Brentano String Quartet has become synonymous with probity, imagination, and technical radiance. They were the inaugural ensemble-in-residence at Princeton University, later held the same distinction at Yale, and continue to inspire new generations through performances, commissions, recordings, and collaborations with some of the most celebrated artists of our time. Their discography—ranging from Bach to contemporary voices—reflects a group dedicated not merely to playing music but to thinking through it, revealing its inner logic and poetic resonance.
On this evening, their legacy was not merely referenced; it was made present.
Mark Steinberg, Violin. Member, Brentano String Quartet. Courtesy brentanoquartet.com
Haydn’s Op. 54, No. 2: Creation, Doubt, and Transcendence
Where wit meets revelation
Haydn, often called the father of the string quartet, becomes in the Brentano’s hands something more intimate: the genre’s first philosopher-poet. In the opening movement of the C-major Quartet, Op. 54, No. 2, they captured the composer’s delightful paradoxes—the genial opening, the unexpected silences, the sense of a melody searching for its own footing. As Misha Amory observes in his program writing, Haydn’s silences are rhetorical winks from “a higher intelligence teasing the presumptions of ordinary mortals.”
The Brentano honored this, playing with a feather-light articulation that nonetheless bore architectural clarity, allowing each interruption to feel both mischievous and metaphysically charged. Throughout, Mark Steinberg’s upper-line dialogue shimmered with conversational spontaneity, while Serena Canin supplied a luminous counter-poise, her tone warm yet clear as river-glass.
Serena Canin, Violin. Member, Brentano String Quartet. Courtesy brentanoquartet.com
Then came the astonishing slow movement—Haydn at his Romani-inflected most soulful—where Nina Lee’s cello lifted the violin’s improvised lament “heavenwards,” precisely as Amory describes. Here, the Brentano played with a kind of whispered intensity, as though the music were being discovered in real time.
The Finale, an unorthodox slow movement, unfolded like a meditation on memory and transcendence. When the sudden Presto burst in—children racing past the cathedral doors, perhaps—the Brentano rendered it with comic brilliance before dissolving back into the dignified quiet from which the piece emerged.
It was Haydn, not as Classical decorum but as existential drama, rendered with uncommon intelligence and heart.
Bartók’s Fourth Quartet: Fire in the Architecture
Symmetry, strangeness, and the night’s inner voice
If Haydn invents the cosmos, Bartók fractures it into dazzling geometry. The Brentano’s performance of the String Quartet No. 4, Sz. 91 was nothing less than electrifying.
The opening movement—a thicket of mirrored lines, invertible counterpoint, and chromatic ecstasy—was shaped by the ensemble with virtuosic control. The Brentanos play Bartók as though the music were carved in glass: sharply etched, translucent, and forever shifting with the light.
In the scherzo-like second movement, their fleet, muted textures seemed to evaporate into the hall, “cirrus clouds scudding about the sky,” in Amory’s unforgettable formulation. The pizzicato fourth movement was delivered with rustic joy—the famous “Bartók pizzicato” snapping like sparks from a bonfire.
But the emotional summit was the third movement, Bartók’s signature “night music.” Nina Lee offered a cello line of wrenching depth, ascending like a solitary figure illuminated by moonlight, while Steinberg’s answering violin hovered with spectral delicacy. The Brentanos have long excelled in music that requires both structural understanding and emotional vulnerability; here, their mastery was profound.
Misha Amory, Viola. Member, Brentano String Quartet. Courtesy brentanoquartet.com
Dvořák’s Op. 106: The Return Home and the Healing of Memory
A luminous journey through nostalgia and renewal
Dvořák’s String Quartet No. 14 in G Major, Op. 106 does not fit into the mythic Old Testament/New Testament dichotomy of Beethoven and Bartók, yet it completes the evening’s cosmology beautifully. As Mark Steinberg notes, the quartet is suffused with stesk—the Czech form of yearning that is deeper, more existential than mere nostalgia.
The Brentano captured this duality with grace: the opening movement radiated optimism, but its silences and suspended phrases hinted at unspoken longing. Serena Canin shone here with her characteristically elegant phrasing, shaping Dvořák’s melodies with both tenderness and strength.
The slow movement unfolded like a folktale told in murmurs, the Brentano drawing upon essential terms—doubleness, organic unfolding, memory-transformation—to reveal how Dvořák layers innocence and danger within a single gesture.
By the Finale, when the first movement’s theme returns “as if from afar,” the Brentano delivered the transformation with luminous warmth, fulfilling Steinberg’s image of a melody “fully debarbed, glowing with a radiant luminescence.”
Dvořák’s homecoming became ours.
Nina Lee, Cello. Member of the Brentano String Quartet. Courtesy brentanoquartet.com
A Testament to the Power of the Quartet
By night’s end, one felt that the Brentano String Quartet had not merely performed three masterworks—they had reenacted the evolution of the quartet itself:
- Haydn: the birth of form - Bartók: the shattering and remaking of structure - Dvořák: the healing embrace of memory
In doing so, they affirmed why the medium remains, as Tovey and Keller insisted, the hallmark of a composer’s authentic voice. And they reaffirmed their own place among the world’s most searching, soulful ensembles.
Contact Information & Ticket Links
92NY (92nd Street Y) 1395 Lexington Avenue New York, NY 10128 Tickets and Season Information
Brentano String Quartet
https://www.brentanoquartet.com/ Booking & Information: [email protected]
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