Faust / Schreiber / Tamestit / Queyras / Poltéra

• Classical Music

The first chamber music evening at the Laeiszhalle sets the standard for the season. It sees five musicians, each with impressive solo careers in their own right, come together to celebrate their mutual love of making music in an intimate setting. They have just recorded a Schumann album with an almost identical line-up, hailed by The Guardian as »by any standards chamber music playing of the highest class.« Now Isabelle Faust, Anne Katharina Schreiber, Antoine Tamestit, Christian Poltéra and Jean-Guihen Queyras host a veritable »Schubertiade«, as Franz Schubert himself and his contemporaries used to call music parties with friends where his works were performed.

The programme also features two late works by the composer that the music world still holds in deep affection: Schubert wrote his String Quartet in G major after witnessing the premiere of a Beethoven quartet (Op. 130) in 1826. For the first few months after hearing it, he was so impressed by the work of his great idol that he couldn’t bring himself to put pen to paper. Then, in just eleven days, he wrote a string quartet that broke brand new ground for the listening public, with its multiple shifts between major and minor keys, its sharp contrasts, and prevalence of sounds rather than melodies.

Two years later, just a few months before his death, Schubert wrote his Quintet in C major, an entrancing »swan song« that foreshadows the afterlife. Two cellos provide a dark tonal palette, while the slow, mysterious passages render all sense of time void, and even the fast movements fluctuate between an energy filled with forward motion and an introspective cessation. Both works were only published and premiered a few years after Schubert’s early death – yet in spite of this, the musical language they speak had lost none of its radicalism.

PERFORMERS

Isabelle Faust violin

Anna-Katharina Schreiber violin

Antoine Tamestit viola

Jean-Guihen Queyras violoncello

Christian Poltéra violoncello

PROGRAM

Franz Schubert
String Quartet in G major, D 887

- Interval -

Franz Schubert
String Quintet in C major, D 956