New Esterházy Quartet: Haydn and His Students III

What do you do when you’ve publicly performed every last string quartet Joseph Haydn ever wrote? Find more quartets to play, of course. The New EsterházyQuartet, having run out of Haydn a couple years back, is focusing now on his contemporaries and pupils. November’s set includes a Haydn quartet, a Beethoven quartet (the formidably dark Opus 95), and quartets by Anton Reicha and Nicolas Zmeskall. It’s terra incognita even for me, since I’ve never run across Zmeskall, and, though I know some Reicha, I’ve never heard or played a string quartet of his. But I trust the NEQ’s judgment, and I know from personal experience that the early 19th century is chock-full of terrific and completely unknown chamber music. A grab bag, yet a mighty appealing one.