Verdi & Bartók String Quartets

Week four of the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival’s 2025-26 broadcast season features two extraordinary string quartets. The Verona Quartet makes its Festival debut performing Giuseppe Verdi’s sole chamber work, the String Quartet in E Minor. Verdi wrote it in Naples, in 1873, during a production delay of his opera Aida. The Verona’s violist, Abigail Rojansky, appreciates the opportunity to inhabit Verdi’s music. “If you think about his operatic contributions, we get that,” she remarked about the piece. “We get extreme pain, sadness and tenderness, and somehow he also finds these moments of just pure celebration.”  After the Verdi, the Escher String Quartet delivers one of the iconic chamber works of the 20th century: the String Quartet No. 5, which Bartók composed in 1934. The Escher String Quartet met as students at the Manhattan School of Music in 2005, and the ensemble really came into their own through the process of mastering this incredibly difficult work of great power and depth.