This afternoon, I took a break from the exhibition hall and went to hear the Mendelssohn String Quartet at the Arthur Curley Memorial Lecture. The music was beautiful! The quartet played two pieces, Janacek’s Kreutzer Sonata (not to be confused with Beethoven’s piece of the same name) and Brahm’s Quartet in A Minor, Op. 51, No. 2. Before each piece, one of the quartet players gave a brief introduction and explanation of the work (a great help to the unsavvy classical music lover, such as myself.) And there was a library tie-in: Janacek’s work is not based on the Beethoven piece, after all, but on the Tolstoy short story of the same name… Which was based of course, on the Beethoven. Music about literature about music– I thought that was pretty neat.

More about the RUSA hot topics in reference discussion later!