Performers
- Martin String Quartet
- Sam Panner I violin
- Weronika Weiss II violin
- Anna Meenderink viola
- Ori Ron cello
- Łukasz Strusiński host
Programme
Caroline Shaw Entr’acte (Polish premiere) [11’]
Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy String Quartet No. 2 in A minor, Op. 13 [31’]
I. Adagio – Allegro vivace
II. Adagio non lento
III. Intermezzo: Allegretto con moto – Allegro di molto
IV. Presto – Adagio non lento
Ori Ron Tune In (selection) [10’]
II. Amsterdam #4
III. Allegro satirico
Concert description
Before “a composer” became a separate profession, those who wrote music were also, as a rule, its regular practitioners. Although, over time, narrower and narrower specializations have emerged in the art of sound, and today we appreciate in authors the fact that they know all instruments inside out, it is still the case that they dedicate their best works to those on which they themselves played. Martin has chosen string quartets whose composers could themselves perform in them (in one case, they even will!). Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy primarily played keyboards, but also the violin, Caroline Shaw, the 2013 Pulitzer Prize winner, is also a violinist, and Ori Ron is a cellist – part of the Martin string quartet. The artists are also connected by their youth. At the time of writing String Quartet in A minor, the first of his life, Mendelssohn was only eighteen, Ron composed Tune In at the age of twenty-six, and Shaw’s Entr’acte was written when the composer was twenty-nine. So maybe it is worth listening to these works not by comparing a 19th-century quartet with a 21st-century one, but by looking for the energy of youth?
– Dominika Micał (pisanezesluchu.pl)