34. Main Evening Concert

This year Danel Quartet, one of Europe’s top Quartets, celebrates their 30th Anniversary. Almost single-handed the Quartet have succeeded in making the world aware of Weinberg’s powerful set of string quartets composed over almost fifty years, first matching and then exceeding Shostakovich. His First Quartet, written in 1938, was the work of a self-taught teenager in Warsaw playing in his father’s Jewish Theatre. He returned to revise it 48 years later. His Second Quartet (revised in 1987 into a Chamber Symphony) was written at the Belorussian Conservatoire in Minsk where he landed after his escape from Nazi-occupied Poland. Its opening serenade and song-like Andante pre-date his second equally miraculous flight from Nazi invasion in 1941. His Third Quartet was composed in Moscow in 1944 as the War was grinding to its end. It is unequivocally a war work built around an overwhelming funeral march of unbearable beauty and intensity. It is deeply ironic that the Festival is featuring the life of a composer, whose entire life hinged on his escape from invading armies, at the same time as his host country launches its invasion of its neighbour.