two free hours of string quartets

This has finally finished releasing, one a week all month, and I've watched them, so I can recommend it for the remaining week (closes on March 5) that it'll be up: four half-hour concerts by the Jupiter String Quartet, each beginning with a serious, mostly even anguished, classic quartet movement (by Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn), and concluding with a more hopeful-sounding new work. In between, two of the concerts have introspective slow movements (by Haydn and George Walker).

I liked all of these, but the most dramatic of the initial pieces was definitely the third, the first movement of Mendelssohn's Op. 80 in F Minor, though the second, the slow movement of Schubert's "Death and the Maiden," though a fairly smooth rendition, did grow on me. Of the new pieces, the most fun was a rag by William Bolcom in the fourth concert, while one by Michi Wiancko in the second (which I'd heard in full in another Jupiter concert) was the one that grew on me.