Chamber concert: Cello, Clarinet and Piano

Soup with cello and piano

Welcome to a soup concert dedicated to the wonderful music country of Czechia. While most people are familiar with and enjoy Dvořák, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra's cellist Hanna Dahlkvist and guest pianist Darya Tchaikovsky show that there is so much more.First, we hear music by the extremely talented conductor and composer Vítezslava Kaprálová (1915–40). She passed away at the age of 25 from tuberculosis but managed to compose an impressive amount of music. She also wrote a series of excellent chamber music works, such as the explosive Deux ritournelles for cello and piano.Vítezslava Kaprálová studied with Bohuslav Martinu, and from him, we hear the brightly colored and rhythmically vibrant third cello sonata – one of his most beloved pieces. Martinu, in turn, studied with Josef Suk, who was Antonín Dvořák's favorite student at the Prague Conservatory. They also got to know each other personally, and Josef Suk later married Dvořák's daughter Otilie. Suk's music is characterized by a flowing melody and lyrical passion, as heard in his Ballad and Serenade, which at times recalls Brahms's late chamber music.***Menu: Broccoli soup with parmesan. The soup is served with sourdough bread, crispbread, butter, mineral water/light beer, coffee/tea, and a piece of chocolate. Wine and beer available for purchase for those who wish.All soups are lactose- and gluten-free. Please inform us of any special dietary requests when booking.

Chamber Concert: Piano Quartet

There is intriguing soul food to be discovered in this chamber concert: The symphonist Mahler is hardly connected with small ensembles. However, he loved »Hausmusik« and wrote the inventive and passionate quartet movement in A minor in 1876 during his time as a student in Vienna, music that even back then »stirred up great sympathy«. Later, in 1973, the sketched opening of a scherzo surfaced, which Mahler had apparently intended to be the second movement – and Alfred Schnittke adopted these bars as the foundation for his exciting Piano Quartet from 1988: He developed a process with the aspiration to »remember something that never came to be«. But the endeavour to track Mahler's tonal language fails repeatedly and the composition finally culminates in the original quotation from the fragment: »It appears and pauses« – and so remains further unfinished. Brahms wrote his Piano Quartet op. 25 during a difficult phase of his life, full of self-doubt. It remains a speculation whether he thought of his beloved Clara Schumann with every bar – who played the piano part at the premiere in 1861 and was »terribly nervous« because the work »lay so heavily on her heart«. It captivates with its intense motivic relationships and features a Hungarian-flavoured rondo as a sweeping finale. The first string quartet by Josef Suk is likewise deeply emotional: it was composed in 1896 and a contemporary raved that it was »the best« he knew of Suk. The beguiling work does indeed also revel in Bohemian folklore, but the sometimes very introspective view and the fluctuating moods make it sound like a confessional psychogram – after all, Josef Suk saw himself as an artist who wanted to express with music »what the soul was full of«.

Chamber concert: Piano quintet

This programme is inspired by a world of romantic feelings: Brahms had been tinkering with the composition of a quintet since 1862 – at a time when he was continually fragile due to failures and said despondently: »When you go on 30 and feel weak like I do, you like to lock yourself up and look at the walls in your sadness«. Nevertheless, he became self-confident, exercised, learned Latin and felt, »I'm growing!« Moreover, the Hamburg-born composer moved to his adopted home of Vienna, where he lived near the Prater and could drink his wine »where Beethoven used to drink it«. In 1864, he finally finished the piano quintet, about which his soulmate Clara Schumann raved: »I feel after the work as if I had read a great tragic story.« The remarkable composition captivates with a plethora of original thoughts that are artfully developed – it is also filled with a profound seriousness in long parts. Elgar‘s moving piano quintet also bears witness to a similar state of mind: it was composed in 1918/19 at a time when his life was overshadowed by worries, illnesses, fears and the loss of loved ones in the wake of the horrors of war. Despite his great fame in London, the highly sensitive composer retreated to the countryside to find a break from the world's noise – to which he soon had nothing more to say in music: he wrote only a few works, such as the piano quintet. Even though it sounds at times belligerently agitated, a gloomy mood and a sheer overwhelming nostalgia spreads again and again as a witness to his broken soul – after all, he noted at the time: »Everything comforting and hopeful in my life is irretrievably over«.

Chamber concert: Violin Piano

»A very nice change!« This is how our concertmaster Bart Vandenbogaerde describes his performances as a soloist or in small ensembles. The Belgian showed an enormous musical talent from an early age and quickly fell in love with the violin. He has been playing in our orchestra since 2013 and, according to him, feels »very much at home« in Bamberg. In this chamber concert, he and pianist Margarita Höhenrieder will perform inspiring works that embody the spirit of late Romanticism and the fin de siècle. It begins with a stroke of genius by 23-year-old Richard Strauss: his only violin sonata was composed in 1887 and is a milestone full of sparkling tonal colours, which the Munich-born composer mastered so congenially. Gabriel Fauré was living in vibrant Paris at the time, where his opus 13 was premièred in 1877: The composition impresses with an energetic opening movement with original themes, a fantastic Andante in a swinging barcarole rhythm, an ethereal Scherzo and a whirling finale. The concluding pieces, which originate from the homeland of our concertmaster, are characterised by equally virtuoso upswings: Eugène Ysaÿe was a legendary violinist for whom a number of composers wrote pieces - and about whom it was said: »The birds sing, he plays the violin!« But the Belgian musician wrote impressive music himself, including the Mazurkas published in 1884: In these brilliant pieces, intimate music-making alternates with passionate eruptions. This will be an enchanting chamber concert, not least because Bart Vandenbogaerde plays the music on a very special instrument - a violin made by the famous Italian violin maker Guarneri del Gesù in 1742.

Chamber concert: Strings Horn Piano

Chamber concerts are very popular with our orchestra musicians, allowing them to showcase new flavours and put individual instruments in the spotlight. Now, there is a wonderful rendezvous with the horn – about which the »Ideen zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst« (»Ideas on the Aesthetics of Music«) as early as 1784 stated that it was »humanly conceived as a sensitive soul for almost all societies«. Many composers were inspired by the instrument with its snail shape and distinctive sound to create music – including Mozart, whose horn pieces were all written for the virtuoso Joseph Leutgeb. He first played in the Salzburg court orchestra, but soon moved back to his hometown of Vienna. Due to his somewhat simple-minded character, however, he was often the target of Mozart’s witty remarks, who sometimes notated the pieces he wrote for him in different colours or added mocking remarks to the score. One result of this humorous friendship was the horn quintet from 1782, a work with lots of inventive humour and thematic imagination. The second composition was written by Brahms, who once disparaged the horn as a »brass viola« – yet he probably only meant this tongue-in-cheek, as it was his favourite instrument, especially in his youth. This may be why he wrote the poignant horn trio in 1865 as a mourning piece, shortly after his mother's death. It is characterised by a romantic sense of nature and hunting scenes, but also by mournful lamentations. His close friend Clara Schumann raved about the »extremely interesting work« with its opening movement, which is »very rich in engaging melodies«, its »beautiful« Adagio and its finale, which »is full of life«.

Duo Violin and Cello

Piano Chamber Music

Philharmonic chamber music: the fascination of the clarinet

The music world owes a great debt of gratitude to clarinettist Anton Stadler. After all, he inspired Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to write a clarinet quintet which, with its yearning melodies, is one of the most beautiful works of chamber music. In turn, our Composer in Residence Wolfgang Rihm, who died in July , wrote his Four Studies for a clarinet quintet for the clarinettist and composer Jörg Widmann. According to Widmann, Rihm “understood and sensed the essence of our marvellous instrument like very few others”. Andraž Golob, bass clarinettist with the Berliner Philharmoniker since 2021, will present the two works together with colleagues.

Chamber Concert

Composed in 1785, Mozart’s K 478 was his first contribution to the piano quartet genre. The emotionality of the opening movement’s minore key and the subtly wrought dialogue between strings and piano proclaim its high artistic standards. No less brilliant is the Piano Quartet composed 100 years later by the young Richard Strauss. In his youthful élan he vacillates between engagement with romantic models (especially Brahms) and harbingers of his own style. The ennoblement of the clarinet as a chamber music instrument takes us back to Mozart. To the present day, many works owe their existence to the challenge of blending its timbre with the strings. The same is true of Veress’s Trio of 1972 and Penderecki’s Quartet of 1993, whose elegiac finale also pays tribute to Schubert’s C major Quintet.

Chamber Concert

Composed in 1785, Mozart’s K 478 was his first contribution to the piano quartet genre. The emotionality of the opening movement’s minore key and the subtly wrought dialogue between strings and piano proclaim its high artistic standards. No less brilliant is the Piano Quartet composed 100 years later by the young Richard Strauss. In his youthful élan he vacillates between engagement with romantic models (especially Brahms) and harbingers of his own style. The ennoblement of the clarinet as a chamber music instrument takes us back to Mozart. To the present day, many works owe their existence to the challenge of blending its timbre with the strings. The same is true of Veress’s Trio of 1972 and Penderecki’s Quartet of 1993, whose elegiac finale also pays tribute to Schubert’s C major Quintet.