FSQ at USU 2025-26 Series: The Crossing Point
with guests Anne Marie Brink, viola · Mayumi Matzen, piano · Viktor Uzur, cello
September 25, 2025, 7:30 pm | Russell/Wanlass Performance Hall
Program:
Adam Khudoyan | Solo Cello Sonata No. 1
York Bowen | Viola Sonata No. 1 in C Minor, Op. 18
Johannes Brahms | String Sextet No. 1 in B-flat Major, Op. 18
This season opens with a gathering.
A circle that widens.
In this first concert, the Fry Street Quartet steps into joyful collaboration—with three esteemed colleagues and a program that arcs from solo meditation, to duo dialogue, to the radiant fullness of six voices.
Khudoyan’s sonata begins in solitude: austere, searching.
Bowen’s lush duo draws us into intricate conversation.
And Brahms’ sextet—rooted in memory and longing—offers a generous invitation into shared resonance. Music as friendship, unfolding across time.
with guest Thomas Glenn, tenor
November 3, 2025, 7:30 pm | Russell/Wanlass Performance Hall
Program:
Laura Kaminsky | Arboreal
Gabriela Lena Frank | A Psalm of Disquiet
Aakash Mittal | Living Memory | Sundarbans (World Premiere)
Akshaya Tucker | Night Fire
Nicolás Lell Benavides | Lek
This concert is the sonic equivalent of an exhibition—an eco-musical retrospective of the Fry Street Quartet’s long-term engagement with environmental themes. These works emerge from years of relationship-building, commissions, and co-creations with composers who are not just crafting music, but responding to a world in flux.
This program gathers voices shaped by fire, forest, flood, extinction, displacement, and resilience. From Kaminsky’s arboreal tribute to the rooted world, to Aakash Mittal’s musical witness to the climate crisis in the Sundarbans, each piece becomes a listening practice, a prayer, a provocation.
Gabriela Lena Frank’s Psalm of Disquiet holds the spiritual paradox at the center of this moment—hope without denial, lament without despair.
Akshaya Tucker and Nicolás Benavides bring voice to human and more-than-human loss alike.
This music asks:
What do we owe to the places we love?
How do we listen to a world unraveling?
And what might music make possible—even now?
February 12, 2026, 7:30 pm | Russell/Wanlass Performance Hall
Program:
W.A. Mozart | StringQuartet in E-flat Major, K. 428
Leoš Janáček | String Quartet No. 1 “Kreutzer Sonata”
Ludwig van Beethoven | String Quartet in C-sharp minor, Op. 131
The final concert of the season reaches back—not as escape, but as remembrance.
These works span classical elegance, psychological rupture, and transcendent modernity. Mozart offers luminous clarity. Janáček brings stormy, uncontained passion. And Beethoven’s late quartet stands like a mountain at the edge of time—defiant, searching, and radiant with radical tenderness.
Together, this program honors the lineage of the string quartet as a space of intensity and transformation. These composers, in their own eras, were each asking: What is possible within four voices?
The Fry Street Quartet asks the same.
This concert roots the season in resonance, community, and the long arc of wisdom through sound.