Martinů Quartet with Graham Walker: Cambridge Summer Music Festival

Lubomír Havlák: violin

Libor Kaňka: violin

Zbyněk Paďourek: viola

Jitka Vlašánková: cello

Graham Walker: cello

 

Tomáš Svoboda String Quartet no 12, Op.202, ‘Post Scriptum’

Janáček String Quartet no 1, The Kreutzer Sonata

Schubert String Quintet in C Major, Op.163

 

Another opportunity to hear the superb Martinů Quartet, and two more works by Czech composers. Tomáš Svoboda wrote his String Quartet no 12 during the autumn of 2010. Svoboda wrote to a member of the Martinů that this work should express the sense of loss of his friends: “the longer you live, the more likely you are to lose your friends”. But, he adds, the “quartet is positive – a celebration of life”, and says it is a work of deep feeling in which all human experience is accepted and transformed into tenderness.

 

A very different mood is provided by Janáček’s Kreuzer Sonata, sometimes called a ‘wordless opera’ because of the way the unfolding music captures the intense dialogue, emotion and turmoil of the characters in Tolstoy’s novella which inspired the quartet.

 

And to bring this evening of deeply moving music to a close the Quartet is partnered by cellist Graham Walker in Schubert’s String Quintet in C. Composed only two months before Schubert’s death in 1828, the transcendental beauty of the work is generally recognised as his most profoundly sublime composition.