Dorothea Vogel, violist of the much-loved Allegri Quartet, returns to the OT to present a morning of wonderful string quartets by Schumann, Beethoven and many more.
As a culmination of the season, 2 June’s programme will include the most glorious music for string sextet. The players will be Tom Aldren and Joana Ly on violin, Sofia Silva Souza and Dorothea Vogel on viola, and Renaud Ford and Kirsten Jenson on cello.
Starting with Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in a version for string sextet, followed after the break by Schönberg’s Transfigured Night.
The Mozart Sinfonia Concertante is originally a double concerto for violin and viola, here in a version for string sextet.
The piece opens in an Allegro maestoso. The music’s grandeur and poetry need not preclude a vein of playfulness reminiscent of Mozart’s violin concertos. The Andante is a transfigured love duet. Mozart’s own cadenza then pushes the music to a new pitch of chromatic pathos. The finale, virtually unshadowed by the minor key, bounds in with a glorious sense of physical relief.
Schönberg composed his Op. 4, Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) for string sextet in 1899 when he was twenty-five. Despite an earlier, well-received string quartet, it is considered Schoenberg’s first important work, a masterpiece that remains his best known and most accessible music. Lush, dense, highly chromatic yet still just within the bounds of tonality, it can be regarded as a very late example of 19th century German Romanticism, a natural product of the trajectory from Beethoven and Schubert to Brahms, Wagner and Strauss.
