Leonard Bernstein was not only one of the first American-born-and-educated conductors to become internationally famous, he was also a composer, a pianist, and an educator who transcended the classical music field to achieve iconic status in the twentieth century.

Last season, a Schwab Auditorium crowd responded enthusiastically to the Danish String Quartet’s performance of classical music. But audience members got especially excited when violinist Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen led the foursome in arrangements of half a dozen Nordic folk tunes.

Escher String Quartet—an ensemble championed by Emerson String Quartet, Itzhak Perlman, and Pinchas Zukerman—makes its Penn State debut in a program featuring Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s String Quartet No. 23.

“Toronto audiences have become so accustomed to the spectacular and varied multimedia extravaganzas cooked up by the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra’s resident storyteller, Alison Mackay, that we sometimes forget how unique they are,” writes a critic for The Globe and Mail of Toronto.