Chamber concert: Piano quintet

CHAMBER CONCERT: Brass Quintet

Featuring works by Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frideric Handel, Kevin McKee, Leonard Bernstein and others.From our brass quintet’s music cabinet! Compositions for brass chamber ensemble were a rarity in Bach and Handel's day. It was not until the late 19th century that the brass band emerged, becoming particularly popular in America. This new trend meant that the previously neglected brass players were finally able to shine in works written especially for them. Our quintet has unearthed a range of exciting arrangements and breathtaking originals for this entertaining chamber concert – featuring roses without thorns, trees that fall in love, and horses made of steel!

Chamber concert: String quintet

Attention: Change of programme and line-up

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: 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«.

Piano Chamber Music

Chamber concert: Cello, Clarinet and Piano

In 1774, the encyclopaedia »Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste« (General Theory of the Fine Arts) stated that only someone could compose trios »who combined all parts of art with a fruitful and lively imagination, and exercised himself to feel every trait of a character or passion musically and to articulate it in tones«. Our concert brings together three trios by composers who truly had what it takes. Although Brahms actually told his publisher in 1890 that it was »certainly time to go«, his creative energy came back and he composed the clarinet trio op. 114 a year later. Turned in on themselves and almost withdrawn, the instruments engage in a quiet dialogue here, loosened only by the two middle movements. A friend of Brahms said: »It is as if the instruments loved one another.« Clarinet, cello and piano are also musical soulmates in Beethoven‘s trio: According to one critic, they made »quite a good ensemble« in 1799. This popular Opus 11 was named the »Gassenhauer-Trio« (popular song trio) because the fiery opening movement and the heartfelt Adagio are followed by an entertaining finale for which Beethoven adopted a popular catchy tune – from Joseph Weigl‘s opera »L‘amor marinaro« (»The Corsair of Love«). However, the fact that too great feelings can also cause suffering is dealt with in Glinka‘s trio, which he prefaced in 1832 with the motto: »I have only experienced love through the pain it causes!« The emotional work seems like an expression of mental anguish set to music: Although the composer was living a carefree life in Italy at the time, the trio reveals the darker side – unhappy love affairs as well as physical ailments, so much so that one musician called out in dismay after the premiere: »What despair!«

Wind 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.

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.