By Ted AYALA

Local music lovers on a budget this weekend need look no further than neighboring Echo Park. The Fiato Quartet will perform selections by Mozart and Schubert on Saturday, April 4 from noon until 1 p.m. at the Edendale Library. The concert is part of the Edendale Up Close series held at the library under the auspices of Kewa Civic Concerts, which also organizes the long-running Glendale Noon Concerts.

Founded in 2008 the Fiato Quartet – whose players are members of several notable local orchestras including the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the Los Angeles Opera Orchestra and the Santa Barbara Symphony – comprises of violinists Carrie Kennedy and Ina Veli, violist Yi Zhou and cellist Ryan Sweeney. Substituting for Yi Zhao on Saturday will be Erik Rynearson.

On the program is Mozart’s “String Quartet No. 22,” one of the composer’s last quartets and the second of the “Prussian” cycle, and Schubert’s “String Quartet No. 14.”

The latter work is best known by its nickname “Death and the Maiden,” the namesake song that Schubert composed at 18 and which later served as the theme for this quartet’s slow movement. It’s grim power and mature control was a key influence in subsequent generations of composers. In the early 20th century, Mahler, who in his own songs and symphonies was deeply influenced by Schubert, was moved to make an arrangement of the work for string orchestra.

The Mozart quartet was composed on commission in 1790 from Friedrich Wilhelm II, then the King of Prussia. Though its composer would live for barely over a year after the work’s completion, the quartet’s sunlit beauty betrays nothing of the coming tragedy.

The concert is free to the public.

For more information visit www.edendaleupclose.blogspot.com or call the library at (213) 207-3000.

Edendale Library is located at 2011 W. Sunset Blvd. in Los Angeles.

  Ted Ayala