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The Alinde Quartet, named after a Franz Schubert song, performs Schubert's string quartets alongside Schumann's and Schnittke's quintets with pianist Dmitry Ablogin. Their Schubert recordings have earned critical acclaim. This concert features Schumann's Quintet in E-flat major and Schnittke's Quintet, performed with historical awareness.
Quatuor Ébène is a French string 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«.
Ten winners of the Bavarian Young Composers’ Competition, in interaction with the BRSO, have developed miniature solo pieces, each for a single instrument. Together with the orchestra members, the young composers explore the rich technical and timbral possibilities of their respective instrument. The miniatures will be played by members of the BRSO in the orchestra’s colourful concert format “Watch This Space”.