Chamber Music Concert

Chamber Music Concert

Calidore String Quartett, photo: Marco Borgreve Franz Schubert’s biographers puzzle over why this brilliant composer, who was not fully appreciated during his lifetime, left so many incomplete scores and sketches. As in the case of his most famous unfinished work (the Symphony in B minor), it is unclear why Schubert abandoned the work he had begun in the winter of 1820 on a quartet in C minor (after all, the completed first movement promised a fine work). Happily, this was not Schubert’s last word in the genre, and the sole movement of the incomplete quartet functions today as the Quartettsatz in C minor. Thirty-five years earlier, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had received a commission from an enterprising Viennese publisher for a cycle of uncomplicated piano quartets, popular with amateur musicians performing at home. However, Mozart’s works stood out from similar repertoire and heralded the arrival of the great Romantic forms sometimes referred to as chamber piano concertos. One could hardly speak of amateur addressees of Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E flat major, as he dedicated the work to an extremely talented pianist, his wife Clara. She was the soloist in the work’s public premiere at Leipzig’s famous Gewandhaus. The composition, which gives the pianist hardly a moment’s rest, was written at a time when the Schumanns were passionately engaged in analysing the keyboard music of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Chamber Music Concert

Vision String Quartet, photo: Harald Hoffmann Accustomed to the most canonical output by avant-garde composers, we sometimes react with amazement to their youthful works, which often attest to their perfect mastery of the principles of composition with which they were about to dramatically break. Such is undoubtedly the case with Langsamer Satz, a work without opus number for string quartet by Anton Webern. According to the critics, this lyrically atmospheric work, in the spirit of late romanticism, conveys the mood of the mountain trek on which the composer supposedly fell in love with his cousin and future wife, Wilhelmina Mörtl. Enchanted by the aura of Paris, Grażyna Bacewicz returned from her second stay in the French capital having composed there her String Quartet No. 3. This work is characterised by passionate vitality and a wealth of development techniques in the outer movements and a bold departure from the tonal path in the slow movement. Before Johannes Brahms considered any of his string quartets suitable for public consumption, he apparently destroyed some 20 youthful essays in the genre. His admiration for Ludwig van Beethoven’s quartets bordered on a paralysing creative phobia. The Quartet in C minor from Op. 51, sent to his publisher after years of work and revision, turned out to be one of the most groundbreaking works in his oeuvre. Even if it does contain discernible elements of the Beethovenian spirit, Brahms managed to keep a rein on them.

Chamber Music Concert

Quintessence, photo: Wojciech Grzędziński Before the Polish Composers Union commissioned Michał Spisak to write his Quintet for flute, oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon, he had left his homeland to hone his talent under the tutelage of the famous Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Who knows to what extent the opportunity to become acquainted with French chamber music of the first decades of the twentieth century influenced the character of this piece, full of elegance, airiness and attractive – due in large part to the forces – colour? ‘No, young man, not at all like that. More rhythm. It’s a folk dance’ – that is how Edvard Grieg supposedly admonished the young Maurice Ravel as he played one of the ageing composer’s dances. Among Grieg’s numerous arrangements of native melodies, the Four Norwegian Dances, Op. 35, originally composed for two pianos and later reworked – not only by the composer – for various forces, gained great popularity. Paul Hindemith’s modernist Kammermusik cycle, the eight pieces of which are aptly described as ‘modern Brandenburg concertos’, was intended for various combinations of instruments. Drawing on the material of the first piece, Hindemith subsequently composed a smaller work for wind quintet, termed Kleine Kammermusik. György Ligeti’s cycle of six miniatures (bagatelles) for wind quintet was first performed without the last piece (dominated by the interval of a second) in Budapest in 1953 because, as the composer himself supposedly commented, ‘totalitarianism doesn’t like dissonance’.

Chamber Music Concert

Marcin Świątkiewicz, photo: Leszek Zych In the original version of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Harpsichord Concerto in D major, BWV 1054, the solo instrument was the violin. This work was likely composed in either Köthen or Leipzig, during a period when Bach was already very familiar with the works of Antonio Vivaldi and the three-movement form of the so-called Venetian concerto. The harpsichord version of the work may have been written for the famous concerts at Leipzig’s Café Zimmermann or to provide repertoire for one of his talented sons. Since the harpsichord renaissance, to which Wanda Landowska made a major contribution in the first half of the twentieth century, many new compositions for the instrument have been written. While often turning to the musical past, they sometimes also explore the capacities of contemporary models that are being built and constantly improved. Philip Glass joined the ranks of harpsichord enthusiasts at the beginning of this century, composing a concerto in which elements of Baroque texture and motifs are combined with repetitive structures and transparent harmonies, characteristic of this American minimalist. The main aim of Swedish neo-classicist Dag Wirén’s pleasant and airy Serenade Op. 11 was, as its composer wrote, to put listeners in a cheerful mood. After all, the composer’s credo, which probably also accompanied work on this piece, was ‘I believe in God, Mozart and Carl Nielsen’. Edvard Grieg’s Holberg Suite, on the other hand, is a remarkably graceful archaisation created to celebrate the bicentenary of the birth of the writer known as the father of Danish theatre. It would be hard to find a more beautiful example of a Romantic composer ‘reinventing’ the musical past.

Chamber Concert: Baroque music

»Music of human breath, it creates a world of its own, conjured up by the sorcerous forces of sounds which, summoned by an imagination rich in visions, enter and pass through our earthly bodies all the way to the soul.« (Henri Sauguet) Our chamber concert offers delightful pieces for flute and bassoon: Vivaldi‘s trio sonata in A minor is a magnificent composition full of intricate sound cascades, but also of introspective moments with expansive cantilenas. The chamber trio in F major, also baroque, was composed by Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow, who lived from 1663 to 1712 and came from a Leipzig family of town pipers: the melodic roles of flute and bassoon interact intensively on the harmonic foundation of the continuo – with expressive upswings and dynamic outbursts of virtuosity. Beethoven‘s trio is a precious early work from his Bonn days – where he confided to the Kurfürst about his early preoccupation with composing, that his muse whispered: »Just try it and jot down some of your soul‘s harmonies!« The piece was probably written around 1786 as chamber music for private use – and the passionate love for the daughter of a count‘s family might have been the impetus for the lush sounds that are interspersed throughout the otherwise very concerto-like progress of the work. Finally, Weber‘s enchanting G minor trio from 1819, when the composer was ill and obviously dealt with his mental suffering with music: the highly romantic composition is thus characterised in parts by deep melancholy, in particular in the pivotal Andante, which bears the title »Shepherd's Lament« – yet it captivates the listener with a very playful character in the framing movements.

Piano Chamber Music

NDR Chamber Music Concert / Elphier-Quartett

Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet in C minor is one of the composers most personal works. There are striking allusions to Wagner’s »Götterdämmerung« and Tchaikovsky’s confessional symphony »Pathétique«. But Shostakovich also immortalised himself, with themes from earlier works as well as the musical code D-Es-C-H. The piece was composed in 1960 during a visit to Dresden, which was destroyed in 1945. The horrors of the destruction shocked Shostakovich so much that he dedicated the quartet to the victims of war and fascism.

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.

Chamber Concert

This evening of Nordic chamber music covers a wide range of styles by composers from four Scandinavian countries. The historical starting point is the Septet for Winds and Strings, written in 1817 by the Swedish romantic composer Franz Berwald. It is unmistakably modelled on Beethoven’s masterpiece for the same combination of instruments. Grieg’s unfinished F major String Quartet of 1891 exudes a lilting charm and a Norwegian hue, while the E flat major Quartet by his Danish colleague Carl Nielsen (1898) strikes out on noticeably more modern paths. Rounding off the programme are two pièces de occasion: an enchanting Serenade with a touch of Vienna, composed by Sibelius during a holiday on Finland’s Archipelago Sea, and a humorous “unrequited” nocturnal serenade by Carl Nielsen, written during a concert tour in 1914.