Chamber Music: Glière Quartett

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.

NDR Chamber Music Concert with the Noah Quartett

The NDR’s chamber concert season comes to a close with the ultimate genre in chamber music: the programme selected by the Noah Quartet – which is made up of musicians from the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra – features three string quartets. The enigmatic standalone Quartet Movement in C minor is one of the numerous scattered pieces of individual movements that Franz Schubert never completed. Its tragic, shimmering energy makes it impossible not to lament Schubert’s failure to go further than this single movement. Beethoven’s Three Quartets Op. 59 were nothing less than a revolution for the string quartet genre. Never before had such density of motivic combination, polyphonic sleekness and thematic finesse been achieved in the form. Despite their complexity, the works were immediately successful: »In Vienna, Beethoven’s latest ¬– difficult yet tasteful – quartets are enjoying increasing popularity; their admirers hope to see them in print soon,« reported one enthusiastic reviewer. Although now very popular with artists and audiences alike, Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet was initially met not only with bafflement and amazement, but also with disapproval and hostility. Ravel had delivered an abundance of melodic and harmonic surprises for which the time was apparently not ripe. Gabriel Fauré, as a teacher and dedicatee, like many other composers, was very reserved about the work. It took some clear words from Claude Debussy to gradually pave the way for the work’s acceptance.

Chamber Concert: Quartett Oktett

A splendidly interwoven sound tapestry! The chamber concerts do not require a conductor – because our musicians love to count on each other in a smaller setting. This programme starts with string playing and a key work of the string quartet genre. Ravel’s piece was premiered in 1904 and is an inspiring example of the vibrant spirit in France at that time – where Cocteau advised the young avant-garde: »Cultivate what the public accuses you of, because that’s exactly what you are.« This is exactly what Ravel, as a »master of musical masks«, did in his only string quartet: he veiled the traditional norms of composition in his own characteristic way and created music that is refined and relatable – which may be peculiar, but nevertheless captivates with its grandiose sound effects and deep emotional worlds. Schubert’s Octet then takes us right into the heart of Romanticism: it was written after a difficult phase in his life, which he sought to »make as beautiful as possible« through his imagination. And so, exactly 200 years ago, he wrote the opulent work in a true creative frenzy, with which he wanted to »pave his way to the great symphony« – and indeed, it widens the intimate chamber music sound to the limits of the orchestral. One of the emotional highlights is the Adagio, a »song without words« typical of Schubert with an elegiac melody and a flow of notes passing by. The finale begins with sombre sounds, but it then develops passionately – and leads to a spectacular conclusion to this gripping milestone, about which a contemporary wrote: »Mr Schubert’s composition is worthy of the author’s recognised talent, full of light, pleasant and intriguing.«

Chamber Music Concert

Valentin Şerban (fot. P. Andrada), Sào Soulez Larivière (fot. J. Reichardt), Tomasz Daroch (photo: Ł. Rajchert), Andrzej Ciepliński (photo: W. Grzędziński), Gabriel Czopka (photo: G. Mart), Tymoteusz Bies (photo: W. Grzędziński) An aubade is a type of love song performed – as opposed to a serenade – in the morning. George Enescu turned to this genre early in his career, in the twilight of the nineteenth century. In Enescu’s piece, three string instruments take part in delightful and lazy morning banter. Also in a mood of playfulness and life affirmation is the D major Quintet for an unusual mixture of forces, composed at the same time by the slightly older Ralph Vaughan Williams. Filled with sweet, charming melody, this work by the famous English folklore scholar was first performed in the new century and was one of the works closest to his heart. It has been several decades since the works of Ernő Dohnányi, a Hungarian immigrant condemned to long years of oblivion in his homeland, were restored to the repertoire. His first compositional achievements enthralled the ageing Johannes Brahms, and as a pianist he quickly conquered the stages of Vienna, London and Paris. His Sextet in C major, Op. 37, full of symphonic grandeur, was completed while the composer recovered from illness and first performed in 1935. Unlike his famous compatriots with folkloristic inclinations – Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály – whose works he promoted, Dohnányi turned to the tradition of late German romanticism in his Sextet, which also displays his characteristic humour. Event within the Romania-Poland Cultural Season 2024-2025

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

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’.

Piano Chamber Music

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 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.