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RENCONTRES INÉDITES VI
Brahms, Schoenberg
These Rencontres Inédites celebrate the string sextet genre through the masterpieces of Brahms and Schoenberg, bringing together a superb team of chamber musicians emblematic of the Verbier Festival.
Programme
JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897)
String Sextet No. 1 in B-flat major Op. 18
(Jansen, Dalene, Power, Szücs, Blendulf, Kanneh-Mason)
Interval
ARNOLD SCHOENBERG (1874-1951)
Verklärte Nacht Op. 4
(Jansen, Brovtsyn, Ridout, Teh Engstroem, Mäkelä, Blendulf)
Distribution
- Boris Brovtsyn violin
- Johan Dalene violin
- Janine Jansen violin
- Lawrence Power viola
- Blythe Teh Engstroem viola
- Timothy Ridout viola
- Máté Szücs viola
- Daniel Blendulf cello
- Sheku Kanneh-Mason cello
- Klaus Mäkelä cello
According to Brahms’s interpreters, his String Quintets and Sextet were the ideal formation for him, the one in which the composer found the miraculous balance between the broadness of the sound spectrum and the intimacy of chamber music. It has to be said that the writing of the first String Sextet, with all its melismas in the intermediate voices, describes a soundscape, with all its subtle nuances of colour and ephemeral elements of detail, as much as it develops a musical discourse. Extremely varied in its textures and proposals, from the famous theme and variations in the slow movement to the pastoral scene in the third, it allows each performer to express the particularity of his or her sound without disturbing the discourse of the others.
There is a little Brahms in Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night, but above all, a lot of Wagner; the feat of the young Viennese composer was to synthesize these two compositional traditions, which were reputed to be irreconcilable. Here, the textures are more orchestral, and the aesthetic sometimes moves away from the pure melodic line towards the thrill of sound. But the time when the Transfigured Night has been composed was also the golden age of a certain school of violin and other string instruments; a source of inspiration to which the violinists, violists and cellists assembled for this concert are worthy heirs.