In the 2021-2022 season, we are excited to announce “Dido Reimagined”, a new performance project sparked by the famous “Dido’s Lament” from Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas. We have invited composer Melinda Wagner and librettist Stephanie Fleischmann to respond to this aria, and more broadly to the story of Queen Dido, with a large-scale work that we will perform with soprano Dawn Upshaw, together with Purcell’s aria and other selections from Baroque opera.

In an original project conceived and elaborated by our first violinist, Mark Steinberg, we present J.S. Bach’s entire Art of Fugue in concert. The Art of Fugue is an intense meditation by Bach on a single theme, which is viewed from every imaginable perspective over the course of 16 fugues and 4 canons. Our project aims to leaven the rich density of this composition by bringing other media into the mix: several “fugal” readings by writers as diverse as Carl Sagan, Lewis Carroll and May Swenson, a play by Itamar Moses written in fugal form that we will perform ourselves, and an enormous stage sculpture by Gabriel Calatrava with which several dancers interact as they choreograph the music. Through these media, the audience is invited to share the feeling of being in the middle of a fugue as it is being performed.

The premiere of this project was in February 2016 at the 92nd St Y in New York, and we are excited to present it again for Da Camera of Houston on March 3, 2017.

We are excited to be joining the Faculty of the Yale School of Music! At Yale, in addition to appearing in concert every semester, we look forward to coaching YSM’s accomplished graduate students, and to interacting with YSM’s faculty and the University community at large. Continue reading…

We are now learning a brand new piece written for us by our friend, the fantastic composer Steve Mackey. Here’s a video we did where he talks about the piece. Come hear the world premiere in Carnegie Hall on February 12! Other performances in Yellow Barn and the Nasher Center in Dallas in November to mark the 50th anniversary of the assassination of JFK.

Brilliant composer and jazz pianist Vijay Iyer is writing a piano quintet for us to play with him. We’re really excited about this project! Here’s a video we made where Vijay talks about it.

The Brentano Quartet is now on (or at least behind) the silver screen! The critically acclaimed film “A Late Quartet”, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Christopher Walken and Catherine Keener, and directed by Yaron Zilberman, opened on November 2.

Based on Beethoven’s late quartet, opus 131, the film uses our new recording of this work as the basis of its soundtrack. Our cellist Nina, complete with glamorous hairdo, has a walk-on role (appearing as herself, a role she is perfectly suited for), and best of all gets to hear her name said, several times, by some of her favorite actors!

 

Check out the film’s website here: alatequartet.com

 

or go to the movies and see it today.

Here’s a live concert recording from Princeton University — a beautiful concert hall and also our school!

Our first violinist Mark Steinberg introduces the Fragments Project: the Quartet has commissioned several composers (Charles Wuorinen, Sofia Gubaidulina, John Harbison, Vijay Iyer, Bruce Adolphe, and Stephen Hartke) to write pieces related to fragmentary works by earlier composers (Dufay, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, and Shostakovich)