The Valley Concert Society presents the Butter Quartet in concert on Friday, Nov. 8.
The concert begins at 7:30 p.m. at Matsqui Centennial Auditorium, 32315 South Fraser Way.
The string quartet, which is based in the Netherlands, will present a program titled Well Met By Moonlight.
The members of the ensemble met as students at the prestigious Royal Conservatory of The Hague.
Cellist Evan Buttar hails from Vancouver, the two violinists are American, and the violist Isabel Franenberg is Dutch.
Each half of the program will open with music from Felix Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, arranged for string quartet by violinist Chloe Prendergast. These pieces evoke Shakespeare’s magical world of fairies.
The scherzo from a Schubert string quartet develops the theme with its shimmering quality that is so like Mendelssohn’s fairy dance music.
The two main works on the program are Haydn’s quartet The Dream and a quartet in which Mendelssohn imagines a lover waiting to meet him in the moonlight by a grape arbour.
Violinist Anna Jane Lester and her colleagues are committed to historically informed performance, a key focus of the conservatory where the ensemble met. They have all performed widely in the Netherlands and across Europe.
Tickets are available at valleyconcertsociety.com at $32 for adults/seniors and $20 for students.
Doors open at 6:30 p.m., and there will be a pre-concert talk in the lobby at 6:50 p.m. Call 604-289-3377 for more information.
