Fry Street Quartet to Perform Haydn, Beethoven and Bartók

LOGAN – The Fry Street Quartet (FSQ), the Caine College of the Arts’ resident string quartet, will perform Friday, Feb. 17, at 7:30 p.m. in the Caine Performance Hall at Utah State University.
“While in many ways this first looks like a very traditional string quartet concert, one element is a bit unexpected, which is the order of the program,” Anne Francis Bayless, cellist in the FSQ and associate professor in the Caine College of the Arts, said. “Audiences would usually hear a Bartók quartet in the middle of the traditional ‘sandwich’ of Haydn and Beethoven, but on this program we place one of the shortest of Beethoven’s entire oeuvre of string quartets, his Op. 95, right in the middle of our program.”
This quartet was written during his middle period, which was notable for the ways in which he expanded form greatly; in other words, his middle period quartets were generally much longer than any he had written previously, Francis Bayless said.
The Op. 95 quartet, nicknamed the “Serioso,” went directly against that grain and is a marvel of compactness.
“Anchoring the second half of the program is the sixth quartet of Béla Bartók,” Francis Bayless said. “Written not long before his own death, its composition followed the death of his mother and the outbreak of World War II, both of which affected the composer greatly. He fled Hungary for the United States in 1940, and his String Quartet No. 6 was premiered in New York in 1941. Each movement of the quartet begins with a slow introduction marked mesto, which means ‘sadly.’ It is one of the great masterpieces of the string quartet literature, and we’re thrilled to present it to our Logan audience.”
This season and next, the FSQ will present the six quartets of Bartok alongside the six Op. 76 quartets of Haydn on the NOVA Chamber Music Series in Salt Lake City.
Fry Street and Friends is at 7:30 p.m. in the Caine Performance Hall Friady, Feb. 17. Tickets are $10 adults, $8 seniors/youth, $5 USU faculty/staff and free for USU students with ID. For more information and tickets, contact the CCA Box Office in room L101 of the Chase Fine Arts Center on USU’s campus, call 435-797-8022, or go online to cca.usu.edu.