Emerald City Music brings you not one, but two incredible string quartets on the same stage: the Abeo Quartet and the Calidore Quartet for our Quartet in Spotlight annual series. The collaboration of these two ensembles celebrates a very meaningful relationship and built legacy: the multi-award winning Calidore have served as mentors and teachers to the emerging Abeo Quartet at the University of Delaware. Each ensemble will perform a work on their own in the spotlight. The Calidore performs Mozart’s Quartet No. 16, a tuneful work that redefined the possibility of musical form and bearing a dedication to his contemporary Joseph Haydn. The Abeo performs Shostakovich’s eleventh quartet, a cryptic suite of seven movements that bitterly elegizes the passing of Vasili Shrinsky, a close friend of Shostakovich and a member of the Beethoven Quartet to whom he dedicated four quartets. The Calidore and Abeo Quartets finally join together to perform arguably among the most resplendent pieces of music ever written: Mendelssohn’s String Octet in E-flat Major. Written at the mere age of sixteen, Mendelssohn’s prodigious symphonic vision met his affection late in life as he called it: “my favorite of all of my compositions.”