Concert Series features Pinsky poetry, Takács music

The final event of the Cornell Concert Series' 98th season will feature poet Robert Pinsky and the Takács Quartet in a special program of love poetry and love music entitled All the World for Love. The performance is Saturday, April 20, at 8 p.m. in Cornell's Statler Auditorium. Conceived almost two years ago, the Pinsky/Takács performance currently is touring 14 U.S. cities.

Tickets for the concert are $25, $20 and $15 for adults and $15, $12 and $9 for students of any age and are on sale now at the ticket center at Clinton House (116 N. Cayuga St., Monday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., closed from 2-3 p.m. Saturday; call 273-4497 or 1-800-284-8422) and at the Willard Straight Hall ticket office (Monday-Friday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.; Saturday noon-5 p.m.; 255-3430). Tickets also are available from the Cornell Concert Series web site at www.arts.cornell.edu/ccs. Student rush tickets for $5 will be on sale April 18-19.

Pinsky, the 39th poet laureate of the United States (1997-2000), will read 15 poems, by poets including John Donne, William Carlos Williams, Emily Dickinson, W.B. Yeats and Robert Frost, among others, while the Takács Quartet performs Janacek's Quartet No. 2 "Intimate Letters," based on the composer's love for a young woman, Barber's "Adagio" and Britten's Third Quartet, based on Thomas Mann's Death in Venice.

Pinsky is poetry editor of the online journal Slate and a contributor to The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. He teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University.

His The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1965-1995 published in 1996, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and also received the Lenore Marshall Award and the Ambassador Book Award of the English Speaking Union. His book-length poem An Explanation of America, awarded the Saxifrage Prize when it was first published in 1980, has been published by Princeton University Press in a new edition. History of My Heart, chosen for the 1985 William Carlos Williams Prize of the Poetry Society of America, has also been published in a new edition by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. His collection of essays, Poetry and the World, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award in criticism.

Louis Martz wrote of Pinsky: "the most exhilarating new poet that I have read since A.R. Ammons entered upon the scene. In his peculiar and original combination of abstract utterance and vivid image, Pinsky points the way toward the future of poetry."

The Takács Quartet, writes the Detroit News, "belongs to the first rank of chamber ensembles in the world today. Here are four virtuoso musicians who play with an integrity that expresses discipline as a conditioned ease. And they produce a sound of utterly seductive richness, subtlety and power."

Now in its 27th season, the quartet -- violinists Edward Dusiberre and Károly Schranz, violist Roger Tapping and cellist András Fejér -- has performed in virtually every music capital in North America, Europe, Australasia and Japan, as well as at many major festivals. The ensemble is also known for its recordings on the Decca label, especially its award-winning two-CD set of the six Bartók string quartets.

The Takács is based in Boulder, Colo., where it has held a residency at the University of Colorado since 1983. The ensemble is a resident quartet at the Aspen Music Festival and its members are also visiting fellows at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. The quartet was formed in Budapest at the Franz Liszt Academy in 1975.