Light & dark: Brentano Quartet's 'Chiaroscuro' coming to the St. Francis Auditorium

The celebrated Brentano Quartet is bringing “Chiaroscuro” to Santa Fe.

Slated for Sunday, Feb. 11, at St. Francis Auditorium, the concert bookends Dmitri Shostakovich’s deeply dark string quartet with a pair of joyful works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Felix Mendelssohn.

The quartet named themselves after Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Immortal Beloved.”

“We’re named after Antonie Brentano, who was a patron and friend of Beethoven,” said Serena Canin, violinist and original member, in a telephone interview from New York. “He wrote a love confession to an unnamed woman. A Beethoven scholar speculated it was Antonie.”

The program’s title “Chiaroscuro” is an artistic term referring to the play of light and dark.

“It really applies because two of the pieces are joyful and the Shostakovich is so dark and despairing,” Canin said.

Light & dark: Brentano Quartet's 'Chiaroscuro' coming to the St. Francis Auditorium

The composer dedicated his intensely-personal “String Quartet No. 8” to the victims of fascism and war. He penned the piece in three days while visiting Dresden, Germany, to write a film score about the bombing of Dresden during World War II.

“But it wasn’t actually written until 1960,” Canin said. “I think he could see the destruction.

“It’s played without pause,” she continued. “He inscribed his name in the piece.”

The composer represented his first name Dmitri with the four-note motif of DFCH. In German, F is E-flat and H is B natural.

“Every movement in the piece is based on this four-note motif,” Canin said. “It sort of has the feeling of a suicide note. It has the feeling of needing to be born. The drones could sound like aircraft. There’s despair in it.”

The program will open with Mozart’s contrasting “Quartet in D Major.” The composer likely wrote it for his publisher and friend Franz Anton Hoffmeister, giving it the nickname “Hoffmeister.”

“It’s very genial; it’s very up, with different characters” Canin said. “He sort of thought in operatic characters. It has a very beautiful opening. We start all in unison. It has the feel of an origami sculpture opening.”

Mendelssohn’s “Quartet in D Major” provides an uplifting ending.

“The Mendelssohn is absolutely beautiful with the feeling of exuberance and joyful expression,” Canin said.

The composer dedicated it to the crown prince of Sweden.

Canin grew up in a musical family; both her parents were pianists. She took piano lessons, but they didn’t stick. She began the violin at age 7.

“I wanted an instrument of my own,” she said. “It was really in college when I figured it out, Swarthmore College had a student string quartet. That turned out to be the thing I absolutely loved.

“It represents a way of being in the world,” she continued. “It has an idealism behind it. The whole can be better than the sum of its parts.”

Before they land in Santa Fe, the Brentano Quartet will travel to London, Luxembourg, Germany and Amsterdam.