In this, one of a series of Saturday concerts at this venue, Nilgün Yüksel (violin), Yağmur Tekin (viola), Onur Şenler (cello) and Barış Büyükyıldırım (piano) perform piano quartets by Mozart and Schubert. No information is available as to which ones they will play, but Mozart wrote two such quartets, and Schumann one (if we discount his early Piano Quartet in C minor).
An article by ‘rgolding’ on the Gramophone.co.uk website tells us the following about Mozart’s two:
When, in 1785, the publisher Franz Anton Hoffmeister commissioned Mozart to write three piano quartets, he did not know what he was letting himself in for. What he presumably expected were some amiable drawing room pieces *a la* J. C. Bach or Schobert; what he got was the first great piano quartet ever composed, *and* in G minor, a key Mozart never used lightly. When the Viennese public objected that the piece was ‘too difficult’, Mozart generously released Hoffmeister from his contract; yet he did compose a more equable, if not less difficult, companion piece in E flat the following year, which was subsequently issued by another Viennese publisher, Artaria. … The two works … display a masterly fusion of *concertante* keyboard writing and the purest chamber music style … .
As for Schumann, the only piece by him for this combination of instruments that he wrote, and that is widely performed, is his four-movement Piano Quartet in E flat major, written in 1842 – only weeks after he had finished his Piano Quintet, with which it is often compared. The pianist for the first performance – in Leipzig in 1844 – was Schumann’s wife Clara, and it is thought that the work was written with her in mind. In her diary, she described it as a ‘beautiful work, so youthful and fresh, as if it were his first’. The Andante cantabile third movement, in particular, is lyrical and romantic. Today, this piano quartet is regarded as a seminal work in the genre, and was much imitated by later composers.
Issue 66, December 2023
Turkey’s Centenary Issue
