During the closing concert, Janine Jansen will share the stage one last time with the team of fellow international top musicians who were guests at this year’s International Chamber Music Festival Utrecht. With nine musicians and two additional percussionists, Janine will present a programme featuring three surprisingly different works by Bacewicz, Bartók and Strauss.
Bacewicz & Bartók
The concert opens with Grażyna Bacewicz’s First Piano Quintet Bacewicz. This Polish composer and violinist, relatively unknown in our time, caused a sensation in the last century as a performing violin virtuoso, and her compositions were also appreciated both nationally and internationally. Her Seventh Violin Concerto, for example, won a prize at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels in 1965. In addition to her many solo concertos and orchestral works, she also wrote a great deal of chamber music, including seven string quartets and two piano quintets. Bacewicz completed her First Piano Quintet in 1952. The piece is full of surprising, adventurous timbres and complex rhythms, inspired by Polish folk music. Note, for example, the short, intimate duet for viola and piano in the contrasting middle section of the predominantly swinging Presto. After the poignant third movement, the emotional centrepiece of the piano quintet, the boisterous final movement acts as a liberation.
After the expressive and passionate sounds of Bacewicz, Béla Bartók unfolds, after a dark beginning, an explosion of rhythmic energy. His Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion is a rousing and original work for four musicians, with an extensive percussion arrangement behind the two grand pianos, exactly as Bartók prescribes in the score. It is a relatively late work by the Hungarian composer and pianist, who premiered it himself in 1937 together with his wife, pianist Ditta Pásztory- Bartók. The three movements range from powerful and dark to playful and exuberant. For the pianists, it is a rhythmic challenge, while the percussionists must act with almost choreographic precision to be ready at the right time at the right instrument with the right mallet.
Metamorphosen
Richard Strauss is best known for operas such as Salome and Elektra and his colourful symphonic poems such as Ein Heldenleben and Don Juan. Of his limited chamber music oeuvre, Metamorphosen is perhaps the best known. Strauss wrote his poignant study for 23 solo strings at the end of his life, during the final phase of the Second World War. It is deeply sad, intense, almost hallucinatory music that captivates and enthrals the listener from beginning to end. The work may have been intended as funeral music, in memory of the bombed theatres of Munich (his hometown), Dresden and Vienna. And perhaps Strauss also referred to the tragic fate of the beastly species on earth, mankind.
Metamorphosen is a single-movement composition lasting approximately half an hour. Apart from a few fast, lively passages, the slow basic tempo – Adagio ma non troppo – predominates. The clearly recognisable dark opening motif, which first appears in the low strings, returns in many guises. Sometimes the music derails completely, sometimes there is suddenly room for lyrical passages, for example in a beautiful duet for violin and viola. Sometimes the music derails completely, sometimes there is suddenly room for lyrical passages, for example in a beautiful duet for violin and viola. Based on an unfinished manuscript by Strauss (rediscovered in Switzerland in 1990), it is suspected that this music was initially intended for seven strings, but the final version, which premiered in 1946, is for 23 solo strings. Tonight, the frequently performed version for seven strings will be heard, as completed and arranged by the Viennese cellist Rudolf Leopold (born in 1954).
Even in this smaller ensemble, total despair prevails. Only at the end is there room for resignation, when a chorale-like melody is introduced that closely resembles the funeral march from Beethoven’s Third Symphony “Eroica”. Strauss wrote “In memoriam” in the score. Was he referring to the destruction of the richness of German culture by the war?