Guest
Program Dmitri Shostakovich, String Quartet No. 3 in F Major, Op. 73 1. Allegretto 2. Moderato con moto 3. Allegro non troppo 4. Adagio Franz Schubert, Quintet in C Major, Op. posth 163, D. 956 1. Allegro ma non troppo 2. Adagio 3. Scherzo. Presto – Trio. Andante sostenuto 4. Allegretto Cast Janine Jansen — Violinist Irène Duval — Violinist Blythe Teh Engstroem — Violist Lawrence Power — Violist Daniel Blendulf — Cellist Steven Isserlis — Cellist Venue: Verbier Church (Verbier, Switzerland) Broadcast date: Saturday, July 22, 2023 Program notes Get ready for an unforgettable lineup from the 30th anniversary edition of the Verbier Festival, another anticipated installment of the Rencontres inédites (Unprecedented encounters) series that brings together today’s greatest soloists in chamber music super groups! This edition features violinists Janine Jansen and Irène Duval, violists Blythe Teh Engstroem and Lawrence Power, and cellists Daniel Blendulf and Steven Isserlis. The program opens with Jansen, Duval, Power, and Isserlis in Shostakovich’s magnificent String Quartet No. 3, composed shortly after the end of World War II. This work in five movements evokes the USSR from the 1930s through the end of a world-altering conflict: life before wartime, rising international tensions, the war and the state of shock left in its aftermath, and then the return to something like normalcy. As always, Shostakovich imbues this music with contrasting sentiments: the first movement’s levity and second movement’s tragedy meet in the third’s chilling irony and the final movement’s ineluctable melancholy. After the interval, Jansen, Duval, Teh Engstroem, Isserlis, and Blendulf move on to Schubert’s String Quintet in C, somber and grandiose, almost orchestral in the scope of its sound.
