Upcoming Events

Beethoven's Chamber Music Exhibit

January 17 - April 15, 2023
Special Collections Hall Exhibit and Beethoven Center
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library, 5th floor

Chamber Music scene

An exhibit celebrating Beethoven's chamber music featuring items from the collection of the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies.

Funded by the SJSU College of Humanities and the Arts

Special thanks to the American Beethoven Society and Galen Lemmon

Takács String Quartet in Concert

Thursday, February 16, 2023
7:30 pm
SJSU Concert Hall

Program:
Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, String Quartet in E-flat Major
Benjamin Britten, String Quartet No. 1
Ludwig van Beethoven, String Quartet No. 15 in A Minor, Op. 132

Image of the four members of the Takacs Quartet

The world-renowned Takács Quartet, is now entering its forty-eighth season. Edward Dusinberre, Harumi Rhodes (violins), Richard O’Neill (viola) and András Fejér (cello) are excited about the 2022-2023 season that begins with a tour of Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea, and includes the release of two new cds for Hyperion Records. A disc of Haydn’s opp. 42, 77 and 103 is followed by the first recording of an extraordinary new work written for the Takács by Stephen Hough, Les Six Rencontres, presented with quartets by Ravel and Dutilleux. As Associate Artists at London’s Wigmore Hall, the Takács will perform four concerts there. In addition to programs featuring Beethoven, Schubert and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, one concert consists of works by Britten, Bartók and Dvořák that highlight the same themes of displacement and return explored in Edward Dusinberre’s new book Distant Melodies: Music in Search of Home. The book is published by Faber and the University of Chicago Press in the Fall of 2022. The quartet will perform the same program at several venues in the USA, complemented by book talks. During this season the quartet will continue its fruitful partnership with pianist Jeremy Denk, performing on several North American series.

Throughout 2022 and 2023 the ensemble will play at prestigious European venues including the Edinburgh and Schwetzingen Festivals, Madrid’s Auditorio de Música, Bilbao’s Philharmonic Society, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw and the Bath Mozartfest. The group’s North American engagements include concerts in New York, Toronto, Vancouver, Philadelphia, Ann Arbor, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Tucson, Portland and the Beethoven Center at San Jose State University.

www.takacsquartet.com

Buy tickets here!

Lecture-Recital

Friday, February 17, 2023
10:00 am to 11:00 am
SJSU Concert Hall

Lecture-recital on Beethoven’s Quartet Op. 132 with the Takács Quartet and Erica Buurman (Director, Beethoven Center)

This event is free and open to the public

Conference: Chamber Scenes: Musical Space, Medium, and Genre c. 1800

16–18 February 2023
Martin Luther King Jr Library, 5th floor, Beethoven Center

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a succession of new musical infrastructures, legal and economic regimes, and musical genres and formats dramatically reordered the music professions. By the mid- nineteenth century, the manifold smaller-scale compositions that had emerged from this earlier moment of radical disruption were knowable simply as “chamber music” – a broad generic designation that inevitably smoothed over this music’s complex social origins and aesthetic aspirations. Recent scholarship has recovered something of this complexity, particularly through a focus on oppositional social and performing contexts (public/private, courtly/commercial, amateur/professional). This conference critically responds to this tendency, aiming to re-examine the modern concept of “chamber music” c. 1800.

This conference will feature research presentations, lecture-recitals, and performances, including a public concert with the Takács Quartet on February 16. For additional information, please visit our Conference webpage.

Register here

37th Annual Celia Mendez Young Pianists’ Beethoven Competition

March 25, 2023
9:30 am to 12:30 pm
SJSU Concert Hall

Join us for the final round of our 37th annual competition for young pianists. Six finalists will perform a complete piano sonata by Beethoven.