In the first half of this concert, the Quatuor Danel (consisting of violinists Marc Danel and Gilles Millet, violist Vlad Bogdanas and cellist Yovan Markovitch) will first play Schubert’s 1820 Quartettsatz in C minor, D 703, composed as the first movement of a quartet he never completed. This will be followed by the six-movement String Quartet No 6 in E minor, Opus 35, written in 1946 by the Polish-born Jewish composer Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-1996).
Weinberg, who escaped to Moscow on the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, was persecuted by the antisemitic Soviet authorities after the war, and harassed by the secret police; although praised for his music by critics and colleagues in Russia, in 1953 he was incarcerated in the Lubyanka Prison until Shostakovich interceded on his behalf with Lavrenty Beria. Perhaps ironically, the String Quartet No 6, which was banned in the Soviet Union and received its first performance only in Manchester in 2007, is one of the most approachable of Weinberg’s works, and thus the most likely to satisfy Soviet criteria of tunefulness and appeal to the masses. Here is a link to Francis Humphrys’s article on him on the ‘West Cork Music’ website.
The Quatuor Danel, founded in 1991, is famous for its interpretations of the quartets of Beethoven, Shostakovich and Weinberg. (It is they, in fact, who pioneered the inclusion of Shostakovich’s string quartets in concert programmes.) In the second half, they will be joined by the important Turkish pianist Emre Elivar in Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet in G minor, Opus 57. Emre Elivar has received major awards for his playing; these include the 2001 Steinway Award, the 2002 Artur Schnabel Award and first prize in the 2003 ‘Vendôme Prize for Piano’ international competition. To continue the Soviet theme but on a happier note, Dmitri Shostakovich’s five-movement Piano Quintet in G minor, Opus 57, composed in 1940, was an immediate success, and won the highly prestigious Stalin Prize in 1941. It has since become a favourite worldwide.
Issue 67, December 2024
Beauty in the Wilderness
