Keywords: Chamber Music, Special Concert, Vocal Music
| Les Lilas | |
| Elena Kodin | Violin |
| Isabella Stepanek | Viola |
| Wilfried Bartel | Guitar |
| Jean-Bernard Descharles | Guitar, Vocals |
| Thomas Raimer | Double bass |
Information not provided |
These events are similar in terms of concept, place, musicians or the program.
“Sorrow always – upward glance – celestial dew – recollection”: thus the words that Anton Webern set in his aphoristically short work for soprano and string quartet. They also stand as a motto for this unusual and cleverly assembled programme. The works in the first section come from completely different eras and interlock like meditations – devout, contemplative, ravishingly beautiful, yet pervaded by a “sweet” tone of sorrow. Schubert’s G major Quartet also directs its gaze into unknown dimensions. Few works of chamber music sustain the combination of sorrow and supplication with such existential force and urgency as this unique visionary creation from the year 1826.
“Sorrow always – upward glance – celestial dew – recollection”: thus the words that Anton Webern set in his aphoristically short work for soprano and string quartet. They also stand as a motto for this unusual and cleverly assembled programme. The works in the first section come from completely different eras and interlock like meditations – devout, contemplative, ravishingly beautiful, yet pervaded by a “sweet” tone of sorrow. Schubert’s G major Quartet also directs its gaze into unknown dimensions. Few works of chamber music sustain the combination of sorrow and supplication with such existential force and urgency as this unique visionary creation from the year 1826.
For a musician, the fugue is inextricably linked with Bach, who raised the fugue to dizzying stylistic heights. The Latin fuga means “flight” – in other words, a theme “flees” from one voice to another and is repeated at different pitches. One of the most vital, long-lasting, and eternally modern musical forms of the past and present can be experienced in this chamber concert: starting with Mozart, who savored all the techniques he discovered in Bach, continuing with Beethoven, who replaced what contemporary critics considered the incomprehensible fugue of the last movement of his Quartet op. 130 with a more accessible finale, and finally ending with Widmann, in whose work soprano Serafina Starke runs away from the fugue – or is it the other way around?
For a musician, the fugue is inextricably linked with Bach, who raised the fugue to dizzying stylistic heights. The Latin fuga means “flight” – in other words, a theme “flees” from one voice to another and is repeated at different pitches. One of the most vital, long-lasting, and eternally modern musical forms of the past and present can be experienced in this chamber concert: starting with Mozart, who savored all the techniques he discovered in Bach, continuing with Beethoven, who replaced what contemporary critics considered the incomprehensible fugue of the last movement of his Quartet op. 130 with a more accessible finale, and finally ending with Widmann, in whose work soprano Serafina Starke runs away from the fugue – or is it the other way around?
It is a popular romantic theme: the fine line between genius and madness. In Beethoven’s case, all one needs to do is look at the portrait of the agitated artist with tangled hair and crazy eyes, who jots his notes down on paper in a manic creative frenzy and in the face of impending deafness. Wolf was hospitalized twice – and died in the clinic. When Schumann was admitted to Endenich, “melancholy with delusion” was noted as a diagnosis in the admission book. And the Italian Renaissance prince Carlo Gesualdo was not only a gifted composer, but very probably also a murderer. In the chromatic descent at the end of his madrigal, we seem to hear the agony of a guilty man tormented by remorse. The result? Insanely brilliant music!
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