The 92nd Street Y Presents Aizuri Quartet Plays Beethoven, Eleanor Alberga, And Barbara Strozzi

The 92nd Street Y, one of New York's leading cultural venues, presents the Aizuri Quartet playing Beethoven, Eleanor Alberga, and Barbara Strozzi on Wednesday, November 3, 2021 at 7:30pm ET as part of its fall classical music season, its first fully in-person season since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The concert will also be available via livestream and available for 72 hours from time of broadcast. Tickets for both the in-person and livestream options are $20-$45 and are available at 92y.org/event/aizuri-quartet.

One of today's most dazzling rising string quartets, the Grammy Award-nominated Aizuri Quartet makes their first NYC main stage appearance with this concert. Exceptional musicians and imaginative programmers, they open their program with two short arrangements of madrigals by 17th Century composer Barbara Strozzi before the focal point of their concert - the pairing of a Beethoven masterwork with the first string quartet by the remarkable Jamaica-born British composer Eleanor Alberga. A rich and spellbinding work, Alberga describes the quartet as being "inspired by a lecture on physics and the fact that everything - including our own bodies - is essentially made of stardust." Pairing it with the first of Beethoven's Late Quartets - a work that marks the beginning of his journey into a transcendental world - allows the listener to experience a major Beethoven chamber work from a completely new perspective, and to hear two works from vastly different places and times, both at the edge of something new.

The program includes:

Strozzi: L'usignuolo (arr. Alex Fortes)

Strozzi: L'amante modesto (arr. Alex Fortes)

Eleanor Alberga: String Quartet No. 1

Beethoven: String Quartet No. 12 in E-flat Major, Op. 127

Emma Frucht, violin

Miho Saegusa, violin

Ayane Kozasa, viola

Karen Ouzounian, cello

Comprising 14 concerts performed in 92Y's historic Kaufmann Concert Hall, the fall season includes two appearances by world-renowned pianist Richard Goode; an all-Rossini program from tenors Lawrence Brownlee and Michael Spyres; the first performance by The Knights as 92Y's inaugural Ensemble in Residence; the 92Y debuts of rising star violinist Randall Goosby, intrepid cellist Seth Parker Woods, and the Grammy Award-nominated Aizuri Quartet; guitarist Ana Vidovic; MacArthur "Genius" Award winner and pianist Jeremy Denk, and others, performing a diverse group of repertoire which includes works of Eleanor Alberga, Johann Sebastian Bach, Joseph Boulogne, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Jessie Montgomery, César Franck, Florence Price, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, and more.

A full list of performances and dates are listed below. Concerts are for fully vaccinated audiences. For more information, including purchasing tickets and COVID-19 protocols for in-person performances, please visit 92Y.org/Concerts.