Summer Listening: Beethoven, Haydn and Rush Hour Concerts

We are deep into Classical Music Chicago’s Rush Hour Concert season now, and this series continues to prove itself as one of the best deals for classical music lovers in a city starved for a decent chamber music scene. For those who haven’t been able to attend in person, I’ve pulled together a few standout performances from this season’s YouTube archive.

While these recordings offer a wonderful glimpse into the series, nothing quite matches the immediacy and warmth of experiencing live chamber music in an intimate setting like St. James Cathedral . The good news? There are still several concerts left in the season, including the Chen Quartet’s July 29^th performance premiering a new work by Augusta Read Thomas and the season finale on August 19^th featuring Dvorak’s Serenade for Winds. Two excellent opportunities to discover why Rush Hour Concerts are such an essential part of Chicago’s summer classical music landscape.

In the meantime, if you’re catching up, don’t miss Matthew Lipman’s lyrical take on Brahms’s two viola sonatas or the Kontras Quartet’s engaging performances of Ives and Terry Riley—both are well worth your time.

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I’ve been reviewing less now that summer has arrived, but that doesn’t mean my listening has decreased. One project currently occupying my attention is working through the Dover Quartet’s recent complete recording of all 16 Beethoven string quartets. The last time I encountered these pieces in their entirety was early 2021, when we were all still confined to our homes, waiting for our turn to be vaccinated. Beethoven’s quartets proved to be exactly what those isolated months demanded. Back then, I listened to the quartets in chronological order, hopping between different cycles—Emerson for the late quartets, Tokyo for the middle, and Guarneri to launch the whole adventure.

This time around, I’m pairing Beethoven’s quartets with a selection of Haydn’s quartets—not the complete corpus, but a focused exploration of the Op. 20, 71, 74, and 77 sets. Listening to Haydn and Beethoven side-by-side reveals something fascinating about how each composer breaks away from established convention to forge their own path. For Haydn, the breakthrough comes with the Op. 20 quartets, where he begins to push against the boundaries of what chamber music could express and the sensibilities of light music. For Beethoven, it’s the middle quartets that thrust forward into new, charged territory, reaching beyond the classical framework toward something more personal and intense.

The dialogue between these two masters becomes clear through this paired listening. Beethoven’s quartets cast their shadow forward toward Romanticism, anticipating the emotional landscapes that would define the 19th century. Haydn’s quartets, meanwhile, point unmistakably toward Beethoven, laying the groundwork for the younger composer’s revolutionary approach to the form.

The Dover Quartet’s recording stands as one of the finest available. Cedille’s engineering captures every nuance of their sound, while the ensemble delivers performances marked by discipline and focus, combined with an idiomatic interpretation that feels natural and unforced. Their approach brings out the architectural strength of these works without sacrificing the intimacy that makes chamber music so compelling.