Pro Arte Quartet's
100 Years Birthday

All Shows FREE and Open to the Public

March 24, 2012
Wisconsin Union Theater
3pm - Lecture "Concert Music Today: A State of the Union Address" by noted New York Times classical music critic Anthony Tommasini
7pm - Concert Preview: A Conversation with Anthony Tommasini and composer William Bolcom
8pm - Centennial Concert: The Pro Arte Quartet with Christopher Taylor and Samuel Rhodes
- Webern - Langsamer Satz
- Milhaud - Quartet No. 7
- Bolcom - Piano Quintet No. 2 (World Premiere), with Christopher Taylor, piano
- Mozart - String Quartet in G minor, with Samuel Rhodes, viola
Pre-concert dinner buffet tickets


April 21, 2012, 8pm
Millls Hall
John Harbison String Quartet No. 5
Pre-concert dinner buffet tickets

About the Artist

Championing both classical and contemporary string chamber music, the Pro Arte String Quartet  plays  “wonderfully personal, intense music, performed with real devotion and accomplishment” (The  New York Times).

The quartet was founded in 1911-12 by violinist Alphonse Onnou and other students at the Brussels Conservatory in Belgium. Their first visit to Madison was in 1938, where, two years later, the musicians were stranded by Hitler’s invasion of Belgium and the outbreak of World War II. The Chancellor offered the quartet a permanent home – it was the first such residency ever in a major American university. Pro Arte became the faculty string quartet at UW-Madison in the late 1950s, an appointment that continues to the present day.

The quartet tours nationally and internationally, often premiering new works written specifically for it. In recent years, it has recorded all the chamber music of Ernest Bloch and several other pieces for quartet, some of which were commissioned for it.