concert review: Beo String Quartet

Finally out to a concert for the first time in two weeks and a lot of other water under the bridge. To Willow Glen to review my first chamber music concert in the church that several of the wiser concert promoters in San Jose have moved to after being evicted a couple years ago by the closing of the hall they'd all been using.

The concert was a rather mixed grill of a program by the Beo String Quartet, a young ensemble of players from Pittsburgh. One of them attended Carnegie Mellon, and I guess he swept the others, who'd studied elsewhere, in. One Haydn, light and witty as not everybody does Haydn; one Shostakovich, moderately high on the grimdark scale; a chunk of serious Bach fugues; and three contemporary compositions, one by a quartet member, the others by established women composers whose work I've heard before (Missy Mazzoli and Gabriela Ortiz).

Pretty satisfying evening, though I had to equip myself with a large army of cough drops to ward off the remnant of a long-departed cold.