We saw the Arcanto Quartet play at the Coolidge Auditorium in the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress. For those of you who live in or have visited Washington, DC – the Jefferson Building is the attractive looking one of the three main buildings of the Library of Congress (LOC for short).

I was painfully ignorant of the three works they played.

The first was the String Quartet in D minor, K. 421 by Mozart. Apparently, it is one of only two string quartets that Mozart wrote in a minor key. Despite the cliches about works in minor keys, it was not a particularly sad work. The second movement, the Andante, hardly sounded like Mozart at all to my untrained ears. The program said that much of this work was specifically written as a sort of homage to Haydn, so perhaps it was that influence coming through strongly.

The second piece was Ravel’s String Quartet in F Major. As you might expect from Ravel, it was unfailingly romantic. If I had any complaints, it might be that I detected what I thought were some sour notes from the second violin and viola. But since I don’t know this work at all, I can’t be certain.

The final piece was the String Quartet no. 5 by Bartok. As you might expect from him, it was occasionally lyrical, mixing Eastern European folk dances into the arrangement, but was more commonly a dangerous and traumatic piece (in the best of senses). The  fourth movement (out of five), the Andante, in particular, stood out for the me. At the movement’s completion, I turned to my companion and mouthed “wow” and saw that she was likewise stunned. I wish I could describe it. It ended with a sort of declining, high modernist sob from the first violin that drew out the history of the collapsed dreams of the Old World.