× Following its celebrated performances of Beethoven's “Razumovsky” Quartets at Music@Menlo 2005, the Miami String Quartet made its celebrated return to the festival in 2007 to perform a pair of macabre works: Schubert's harrowing “Death and the Maiden,” composed only four years before the Viennese Romantic's untimely death, and “Whispers of Mortality” by contemporary American composer (and Music@Menlo Encounter leader) Bruce Adolphe. While Schubert's quartet takes but a sideways glance at the subject of death—its second movement draws from a lied depicting Death's visitation on a young girl—Adolphe's work, a cathartic grappling with a loved one's life-threatening illness, confronts death head on.