The St. Petersburg String Quartet will play music from the former Soviet Union in Logan and Salt Lake City this week. "The whole program is somehow connected with an Asian or Caucasus motif," first violinist Alla Aranovskaya said. Prokofiev's Quartet No. 2 was written after Prokofiev had spent time in the Caucasus Mountains and has "a lot of oriental quality," Aranovskaya said. The "Nocturne" from Borodin's Quartet No. 2 has an even more pronounced eastern Asian influence. "Probably everyone knows it from 'Kismet,' " Aranovskaya said. The concert will open with the Quartet No. 1 of Georgian composer Zurab Nadarejshvili, whose works the St. Petersburg has championed ("We received this quartet almost from the hands of the composer," Aranovskaya said), and end with Shostakovich's Quartet No. 9. Aranovskaya started the St. Petersburg Quartet in 1985 with fellow Leningrad Conservatory graduate Leonid Shukaev and "two more crazy people." Cellist Shukaev remains in the quartet; violinist Matvey Lapin and violist Aleksey Koptev joined later. The ensemble started winning competitions almost immediately. Aranovskaya looks forward to returning to Utah, where the quartet last played in Cedar City in 1999. At that time, she and her husband, Misha, a photographer and violinmaker, took a car trip through Utah, Nevada and Colorado. "He made a lot of beautiful, beautiful pictures of Lake Powell, the Indian reservation, Bryce Canyon, the Grand Canyon."

News source: www.lenpravda.ru
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