Haydn seek: Quartet starts new cycle

Things definitely go in cycles for the Leipzig String Quartet — CD cycles, that is. When the quartet isn’t performing concerts, the musicians are likely to be in the studio recording.

The quartet, which performs next week in the Tuesday Evening Concert Series, has released complete sets of works by Mozart, Brahms, Mendelssohn and Schubert, and the next CD cycle has begun.

“We started actually this month on Volume 1 of all Haydn,” cellist Matthias Moosdorf said. “We’ll finish in about eight years. At the end, it will be about 24 CD releases.”

Recording the cycles is a labor of love. But the quartet, which formed in 1988, is in no danger of neglecting its love for performing live.

Tuesday’s program in Cabell Hall Auditorium will include Mendelssohn’s “String Quartet in A major, ‘Op. 13, ‘Ist es wahr?,’ ” Heinrich Isaac’s “Sequentia” from “Choralis Constantinus” and Beethoven’s “String Quartet in A minor, Op. 132.”

“That’s a nice program,” Moosdorf said. “Everything is a reflection of the work before.”

Listeners will be able to follow musical threads from work to work on Tuesday’s program and hear intriguing echoes that show some similar influences at work on the composers.

Mendelssohn was 17 when he penned his string quartet, Moosdorf said. One of six quartets published during Mendelssohn’s brief life, it wasn’t his earliest. (That honor goes to another work he wrote at 14 but didn’t publish before his death.)

Isaac, a Franco-Flemish composer from the 15th and 16th centuries, was a contemporary of the better-known composer Josquin des Prez. “Choralis Constantinus,” a group of polyphonic motets, is from a prolific career that also yielded three dozen masses. Audience members accustomed to hearing more recent music performed by string quartets will be intrigued by its cleaner, stripped-down sound.

Fast-forward to 1825, and keep an ear out in the third movement of Beethoven’s work, which moves the program from the Renaissance toward the Romantic era, but keeps a reverent focus.

“In the Beethoven, there’s a slow movement were Beethoven thanks God for [his] recovering from illness,” Moosdorf said. “The form, language and tonality come from the ancient music.”

The quartet already has almost 70 recordings under its belt, thanks to all those cycles. To Moosdorf, keeping up with the roughly 350 works in the quartet’s repertoire is yet another labor of love.

“It’s like you speak different languages,” he said.

To get tickets for the concert, which is underwritten by Philip and Carol Cooper, call the box office at 924-3984.