The critically acclaimed St. Matthew's Chamber Orchestra and the Lark String Quartet will perform at 8 p.m. on Friday, March 10 at St. Matthew's Church, 1031 Bienveneda Ave.
The Lark Quartet will play Erwin Schulhoff 's Concerto for String Quartet with Wind Orchestra, and will also be featured in Vaughan Williams's "Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis," for solo quartet and double string orchestra.
Caroline Stinson, Deborah Buck, Basia Danilow and Kathryn Lockwood comprise the Lark String Quartet.
The quartet's first violin, Deborah Buck, a former concertmaster of the Chamber Orchestra at St. Matthew's, will perform the "Andante" from Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto. The concert will conclude with Beethoven's Symphony No. 1.
Schulhoff was a Czech composer and pianist and one of the "Forgotten Voices" of composers whose careers, and lives, were ended prematurely by the Nazi regime. Growing up in Prague, Schulhoff later studied with Claude Debussy and Max Reger, winning the Mendelssohn Prize twice, in 1913 and 1918.
He served in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I and joined the faculty of the Prague Conservatory in 1929. Schulhoff composed the Concerto for String Quartet with Wind Orchestra in Prague in 1930. Following the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939, Schulhoff performed under a pseudonym, but was arrested and sent to the Wülzburg concentration camp in Bavaria, where he died in 1942 from tuberculosis.
The Lark Quartet was formed in 1985 and has performed in many of the world's great cultural centers, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Library of Congress, London's Wigmore Hall and L'Opéra de la Bastille in Paris. The group has appeared at international festivals, including Lockenhaus, the Schleswig-Holstein Festival, Mostly Mozart, Istanbul Festival, Wolf Trap and the Beethoven Festival in Moscow.