Welcome from Tim Lowe (Artistic Director)
I’m looking forward once again to bringing to York musicians from the cream of European string playing. They have all been before so it’s great to welcome them back and also to welcome the return of the wonderful Russian pianist Katya Apekisheva. After last year’s festival I received many heart felt messages. This one sums up what I was told:
”… I was struck by the extent to which this was genuine chamber music playing - not a group playing to an audience so much as one listening and responding to each other and fully drawing the audience into their conversation. And the playing had such fire, panache, spontaneity, and sense of enjoyment, beyond what one normally encounters even in a good live performance, simply stellar.”
More by serendipity than planning the 2025 programme has a strong Russian thread. We programmed Shostakovich’s String Quartet no.8 but by chance Hélène Clément, chose to play in her recital Shostakovich’s Viola Sonata; his final work completed only a few days before he died; a stunning, bleak and poignant work of lament and great inner beauty; and who better to accompany this than Katya. In the viola recital Hélène also plays two lyrical pieces by Frank Bridge. She told me that her viola belonged to Bridge (and later Benjamin Britten) so that brings us close to sounds Bridge heard and made (he was a professional violist) as he wrote these pieces.
On Friday evening I am looking forward to all six string players on stage to play the young Schoenberg’s string sextet Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) which is a sumptuous late-Romantic outpouring. The influence of late Brahms is felt here so it is appropriate to play Brahm’s Cello Sonata No 2. Op.99 In which the cellist has to hold his own against a fairly rampant piano part. And we end the festival on Sunday with Brahms’s utterly joyous String Quintet No 2 Op.111 (he said it was to be his last work…it wasn’t).
I hope you enjoy reading through the programme and will come to as many of the five concerts as possible. (note the £15 discount for the ‘all concerts pass’) Meanwhile stay safe and well and I look forward to seeing you 19 - 21 September.
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