24. Main Evening Concert

Homage to Sofia Gubaidulina

The great Tatar composer, Sofia Gubaidulina, died last year at the age of 93. As our homage to her for her lifetime’s work for music, in the first of three Octets in this year’s Festival, we are performing her own Homage to T.S.Eliot. 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, while the ensemble is introduced gradually – strings initially, then winds in the second movement, 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 performers come together again when Gubaidulina sets Eliot’s ecstatic lines that culminate with ‘And the fire and the rose are one’.
After the interval Calidore Quartet is 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.