This year’s festival offers a comprehensive look at the chamber music of Johannes Brahms. Spread over the various evening concerts, Janine Jansen and her international music friends will play the first piano trio, two of the three piano quartets and the Second string quintet that will be heard in the Lutheran Church tonight.
If Brahms had kept to his intention, this would have been his last com- position. Fortunately, he still got new inspiration during his last years of life, and wonderful pieces, for example two clarinet sonatas, also appeared after this work. Brahms composed the Second string quintet in G major in the summer of 1890 in his inspiring summer house in the Austrian town of Bad Ischl. It is unprecedentedly optimistic in colour for Brahms, although his struggle with life also echoes in it, especially in the two middle movements. And that still gives this music that poignant depth we have come to expect from Brahms.
Like last year, Janine’s father Jan Jansen will also perform during the Churches Marathon. This time, together with cellist Oliver Herbert, he will play the extraordinary piece Croce by Russian composer Sofia Gubaidoelina, one of the most striking voices in contemporary music. Her work is original, deeply religious and of great clarity and precision. The Italian word croce means ‘cross’ and refers to the cross symbol, which plays a central role in Gubaidoelina’s oeuvre. According to her, the horizontal bar represents our life in earthly time, while vertical bar represents the connection between man and the divine.
In this enchanting composition for organ and cello, the cross is musically represented by the crossing of the two voices: the organ begins in a remarkably high register, while the cello plays very low, dark notes. Halfway through the piece, the voices meet in the middle-the climax of the work-after which the organ plunges into the depths and the cello rises to a heavenly height.
This year, not only instrumental chamber music will be heard during the Churches Marathon, as Janine Jansen has also invited the successful National Women’s Youth Choir. Led by Wilma ten Wolde, the young, talented women aged 16 to 30 will take a musical journey through time. They combine atmospheric Christmas music from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance with colourful autumnal soundscapes by the Estonian composer Veljo Tormis, who died in 2017, one of the most important composers from north-eastern Europe who became internationally known thanks to his folk-inspired compositions for choir.
Programme and artists
This second route of the Churches Marathon also ends in the Geertekerk with Olivier Messiaen's Quatuor pour la fin du Temps. Janine Jansen successfully recorded this poignant work in 2017 with the Sony label, including with clarinettist Martin Fröst, who is also on hand now. Quatuor pour la fin du Temps is not about an individual agony, but about the end of time. The apocalypse seemed closer than ever when this work came into being: it was premiered on 15 January 1941 under the harshest conditions, when Messiaen was imprisoned in camp Görlitz. He wrote it for the only four instrumentalists in the camp: besides the pianist Messiaen himself, they were a clarinettist, violinist and cellist. ‘Never before have I been listened to with such attention and understanding,’ Messiaen wrote in his memoirs. The poignant sometimes almost suffocating music is directly linked to the misery of World War II. Hunger and cold gave Messiaen vivid hallucinations about the apocalypse. On the score he wrote: ‘An homage to the Angel of the Apocalypse, who raises a hand to the heaven with the words ‘There will be no more time.’
