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Complete Tour de Force- four, then six, then Eight strings in an ecstatic journey from the classical to complete Romantic rapture!

Joseph Haydn- String Quartet Op. 33 No. 1
The Op. 33 string quartets, of which there are six, are often dubbed the “Russian” quartets, because they are dedicated to the Grand Duke Paul of Russia. No. 1 is the only one in a minor key and exhibits the freedom of form that Haydn had already adopted in his Op. 20 set. The ten-year gap between the two sets were spent directing the music for 50 operas at the Esterhazy palace in Vienna, 5 of which were his own compositions; there was also a young Italian singer named Luigia Polzelli who may have served as a distraction! In any case, Haydn announced the Op. 33 quartets as “written in a new and special way, for I have not composed any for ten years”, and they are considered to be works of yet more masterful confidence.

Richard Strauss- String Sextet from Cappriccio
The string septet is from Strauss’s last work for the stage, the opera Cappricio, composed in 1942. The opera takes the form of a series of elegant salon conversations that explore the question of what is more important, the words or the music to an opera. The septet begins the opera as both a prelude to the action and as the first topic of conversation, and is written in the late Romantic style of the 1880s and 1890s.

George Enescu- Octet for Strings in C Major, Op. 7
Enescu wrote his Octet for strings in C major, Op. 7, over a span of a year and a half, completing it in 1900. He wrote of the challenge of its huge form, “I wore myself out trying to work a piece of music divided into four segments of such length that each of them was likely at any moment to break. An engineer launching his first suspension bridge over a river, could not feel more anxiety than I felt when I set out to darken my paper.”

The Octet is considered one of the few works that is a worthy successor to Mendelssohn’s celebrated Octet Op. 20.

May 31, 3:00 pm