Mendocino Music Festival ALEXANDER STRING QUARTET

Celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, the San Francisco-based Alexander String Quartet is widely admired for its interpretations of Mozart, Beethoven, and Shostakovich. The group will play the innovative Haydn String Quartet in C Major, Ravel’s lyrical and virtuosic String Quartet in F, and Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 7 in F-sharp minor. The seventh of Shostakovich’s 15 string quartets was written in 1960 as a tribute to his first wife Nina, who died in 1954. It is a compact work in three movements, but it covers a broad expanse of emotion and musicality.