Homage to Ukraine, the breeze that blows between the graves
Our 31st Festival opens with a homage to the people and artists of Ukraine in their great act of resistance to tyranny. Both Anna Fedorova and Diana Tischenko (pictured) are Ukrainian, while Valentin Silvestrov is their greatest living composer. Silvestrov’s Five Pieces is set in his familiar haunted dream world, a gentle opening work for the first of our fifty concerts. Although we see Prokofiev as a Russian composer, he was born in Ukraine and spent most of his childhood there. His F minor Sonata was composed during and after the Second World War, which explains the funereal aspect of the opening Andante and the raging fury of the Allegro brusco. This incandescent Scherzo matches similar outcries from Shostakovich in those terrible years. The Andante Third Movement lifts the mood with its gentle arabesques. The Finale is an intoxicatingly wild ride, until near the very end when the composer re-visits the wind that blows between the graves and a sad and lonesome postscript.
Beethoven’s five late quartets are one of the ikons all string quartets worship, even Quartets dedicated to contemporary music find it hard to stay away. Despite being written 200 years ago, they speak to us even more clearly than to his own contemporaries. The E flat quartet opens the series and is comparatively straightforward compared to most of the others. The Colburn-educated Calidore Quartet – a name purloined from a Keats poem – will perform it for us. Like Schubert at much the same time, Beethoven explores the overwhelming power of a string quartet in full flight. The strange thing is that despite the intellectual and emotional ferocity of much of this opening movement, there is another part that just dances, dances for joy. It is paired one of his most ecstatic Adagios, seemingly a simple set of variations on a rapt and expressive melody, but what is heart-stopping is the way Beethoven uses changes in rhythm and tempo to dislocate our sense of time so that by the third variation we find ourselves in that strange new world, where time no longer exists. Welcome then to the miracle of our wondrous festival of music.
