24. Main Evening Concert – Homage to Sofia Gubaidulina

As our homage to Sofia Gubaidulina – the great Tatar composer who died last year at the age of 93 – we are performing her own Homage to T.S.Eliot.

Here, in the first of three Octets in this year’s Festival, the classic octet formation of five strings with clarinet, horn and bassoon is supplemented with soprano Katharine Dain. The texts are taken from three of Eliot’s Four Quartets – meditative interlinked poems which draw inspiration from music.

The ensemble is introduced gradually:  strings initially, then winds in the second movement, and finally the solo soprano. Not until the extended 5th movement do all nine performers take part at once. Later, in the 7th movement, all nine come together again when Gubaidulina sets Eliot’s lines and their ecstatic culmination – ‘And the fire and the rose are one’.

After the interval, the Calidore Quartet will be joined by Andreas Brantelid to play Schubert’s supreme composition, the great C major String Quintet. Schubert’s last year was a desperate race to complete his final masterpieces. Beethoven had died the previous year, and the story went that he had left a few bars of a string quintet on his desk. So Schubert, feeling himself to be Beethoven’s successor, picked up where the Master left off. It is also touching that, in his last days, Schubert asked Schuppanzigh’s Quartet to play Beethoven’s C sharp minor Quartet to him.

It is humbling to think that, during those few years in the 1820s in Vienna, the greatest chamber music masterpieces were composed. But the concert’s homage to Gubaidulina reminds us that great chamber music continues to be written!