PORT CLYDE — DaPonte String Quartet will hold a live concert Saturday, Sept. 25, 2021, at 5 p.m., at Ocean View Grange, in Port Clyde. Their performance, “Dissonant and Dissident,” features Mozart: String Quartet in C Major K. 465 (“Dissonance”) and Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8.

Mozart: String Quartet in C Major K. 465 (“Dissonance”) 

In 1783, sixteen years before Beethoven his first symphony, Mozart composed a string quartet with an opening section surpassing in harmonic complexity anything written until Wagner. The question, then, is what Mozart is doing in the first movement of the Dissonance quartet that’s so unusual for its time?  His String Quartet in C Major, nicknamed “Dissonance”, is a masterful combination of notes - harmonic yet surprising, melodic yet startling.

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8    

After his diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in 1960 Dmitry Shostakovich contemplated suicide, and wrote the Eighth String Quartet in only three days (July 12-14, 1960), intended as his own epitaph. Less than seven years had elapsed since Stalin's death in 1953 ended one of the most brutal national terrors ever inflicted. The composer constructs a series of tableaux comprising an almost hysterical denunciation of the Soviet state. Some of the effects Shostakovich uses to paint the pictures are low drone notes, symbolizing electrified fences, or the barking sounds of Alsatian guard dogs against a wildly-scrambling texture evoking the running steps of people fleeing for their lives.

“Come here these two significant works, performed by masters of their instruments, the DaPonte String Quartet,” said DaPonte, in a news release.

Tickets available at www.daponte.org