Strings of Lights

Rather than featuring a soloist, Vivaldi’s boisterous Concerto for Strings in D Major gives the whole orchestra a chance to show off.  In her 2013 Teen Murti (“three representations” in Hindi), Reena Esmail combines traditional Hindustani raag with Western composition technique to present, in her words, “three large musical ‘figures’ that are adjoined by short interludes—similar to the idea behind Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.”  Pēteris Vasks’s named his second cello concerto Klātbūtne, Latvian for “presence” and an allusion to the work’s spiritual meditation on the human condition.  Vasks has said the work “suggests the soul ascending into the cosmos,” which is especially true of its elegiac final movement.  In Ludwig van Beethoven’s first string quartet, arranged for Pro Arte by its cellist Leo Egughi, we hear the composer marking the genre bequeathed to him by Haydn and Mozart with his own distinct and consequential voice.