The Classical Sound of the Ying Quartet

New York City is home to the Ying Quartet. NTD's Christina Sammet introduces us to these musicians and shows us where they get their inspiration. In 2005 the quartet won Grammy Award for Best Classical Crossover for a collaboration merging classical string quartet style with jazz and other styles. On Thursday night they put on a free concert at the Flushing town hall, as part of Carnegie Hall's neighborhood concert series. [Timothy Ying, Violinist]: "The music tonight is actually from the traditional string quartet repertoire…that for the last 250 years almost every famous composer from the western classical musical tradition has created some of their best music for the string quartet." [Timothy Ying, Violinist]: "So we will play an early quartet by Mendelssohn, and then we will play Bartok's last string quartet and one of Dvorak's last string quartets as well." [David Ying, Cellist]: "For example Mendelssohn's world, writing a string quartet as a teenager is so sort of optimistic and positive…but then Bartok wrote a string quartet that was written in the lead up to world war II which eventually displaced him, caused him to move to America, where he lived a very unhappy end to his life. And so the things that come through in that are much more tragic and dark." [Timothy Ying, Violinist]: "To me great music operates on more than one level. So I talked a little about the emotional level – it is communicative. But I think that also great music in the western classical tradition also operate on an intellectual level in that they are very well organized. Or the means of development is really novel and interesting. So that the whole work really hangs together in a very unique and interesting way. So when you are playing it or if you are listening to it there are so many things to appreciate." NTD, Flushing, New York.

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Music

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