THE DAPONTE STRING QUARTET will present a program titled “Death in Venice” today in Falmouth, Saturday in Damariscotta and Sunday in Topsham.
The DaPonte String Quartet will perform a program of Haydn, Beethoven and Benjamin Britten at 7: 30 p. m. today at St. Mary’s Church in Falmouth; at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the Lincoln Theater in Damariscotta; and at 3 p.m. Sunday Mid-Coast Presbyterian Church in Topsham.
The program is titled “Death in Venice.” Each work has a “serious, interior tale lying beneath the notes,” a release from the quartet states.
Haydn’s String Quartet in F Minor Op. 20 No. 5 was written in 1772. “This brooding, early masterpiece, is remarkable for its wide range of emotion using very limited means,” the release states. “It is a quartet written in the mold of the mid- to- late 18th century Sonate auf Concertenart, which is to say a solo work for the first violin accompanied for the most part by the other three players.”
Benjamin Britten’s String Quartet No. 3 Op. 94 was written in 1975.
“Britten undertook his last major work at the pinnacle of worldly success, but in very precarious health,” the release states. “He composed parts of the quartet in Venice; its last movement is titled ‘La Serenissima’ in reference to this city, which is pivotal to its meaning.”
Britten had just finished composing an opera with librettist Myfanwy Piper, Op. 88, on Thomas Mann’s novella “ Death in Venice,” from which music is liberally quoted in this quartet.
“The opera, like Mann’s novella, is openly homoerotic,” the release states. “There is no doubt that Britten identified here on some level with Gustav von Aschenbach, Mann’s spiritually and artistically repressed protagonist, erotically obsessed with a beautiful Polish boy in plague-racked Venice.”
Britten died just before the quartet’s premiere.
Beethoven’s String Quartet in F Minor Op. 95 was written in 1810.
“It is an experimental, transitional work bridging Beethoven’s middle- and lateperiod styles,” the release states. “The composer felt so anxious about how audiences might react to its terse, angular character that, in a letter to Sir George Smart of Oct. 11, 1816, Beethoven wrote: ‘This quartet is written for a small circle of connoisseurs and is never to be performed in public. Should you wish for some quartets for public performance I would compose them for this purpose occasionally.’”
“This quartet belongs to a time in which Beethoven felt he was beginning to lose contact with the rest of humanity, after the anguished period of the Heiligenstadt Testament (the 1802 document in which he confesses that he is going deaf),” the release continues. “He was still improvising magnificently at the keyboard, but his ability to communicate verbally was steadily declining.”
Tickets, available at the door, cost $22 for adults or $18 for seniors. Concert attendees younger than 21 years old will be admitted free.
The DaPonte String Quartet will perform a free holiday concert at 7 p.m. Dec. 10 at the Mid- Coast Presbyterian Church in Topsham.
For information about this and other DaPonte events, visit www.daponte.org.
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