Midsummer’s Music Presents the Hunt Quartet

Hunt Quartet

Midsummer’s Music presents the Hunt Quartet in concert Saturday, September 16, at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Ephraim, Wis. The highly acclaimed group, which played a beautiful program in Sturgeon Bay last May, is the elite graduate string quartet for the Mead Witter School of Music.

The evening’s repertoire includes Joseph Haydn’s String Quartet in G Minor, Op. 77, No. 1, Anton Webern’s Langsamer Satz, Joaquin Turina’s La oracion del torero “The Bullfighter’s Prayer”, Op. 34, and Sergei Prokofiev’s String Quartet No. 2, Op. 92.

The Hunt Quartet members are extremely talented, having won prizes individually all over the world. Collectively they are one of the outstanding young ensembles gaining a growing reputation by leaps and bounds. They’ve selected a particularly exciting program for us.

Members include three doctoral candidates – Chang-En Lu, violin, Blakeley Menghini, viola, and Kyle Barret Price, cello – and one master’s degree fellow – Vinicius “Vinny” Sant’Ana, violin – who work closely with UW-Madison faculty, including the Pro Arte Quartet and cellist/Professor Uri Vardi as their principal coach. They have appeared in concert throughout the Midwest and on WPR in Madison. Chang-En, Blakeley, Kyle and Vinny are also with the Madison Symphony where they participate as a quartet in the “Up Close and Musical” outreach program, visiting area schools to teach students about fundamentals of music and the string quartet. Famous artists who have worked with the quartet include violist Nobuko Imai, violist Lila Brown, and members of the Takacs String Quartet. Midsummer’s Music’s violinist Olga Draguieva is a former member of the Hunt Quartet.

The Hunt Quartet concert begins at 7:00 pm. Adult tickets are $29, students $10, and children 12 are under free. A reception for the audience to meet and mingle with the musicians follows the program.

The concert, which originally featured the , was changed due to an injury sustained by one of the musicians. Midsummer’s Music anticipates rescheduling the Pro Arte concert for mid-November and wishes Cellist Perry Karp success on his continuing recovery.