2025 Programme
19 – 21 September 2025
EVENT 1
Friday 19 September – 1:00 – 2:00pm
Unitarian Chapel, St Saviourgate
Tickets £15 (18 and under free)
Cello Recital
Tim Lowe (cello)
Katya Apekisheva (piano)
Robert Schumann
Fantasiestücke
1) Zart und mit Ausdruck (Tender and with expression)
2) Lebhaft, leicht (Lively, light)
3) Rasch und mit Feuer (Bold and with fire)
Alexander Glazunov
Elegie Op.44
Chant du menestrel Op. 71
Johannes Brahms
Sonata for Cello and Piano No. 2 in F major, Op. 99
We open the 2025 festival with music that was composed to show off the qualities of the cello. With Schumann it is the capacity for music that is like a reverie – a dream state expressed in sound in which nothing prosaic should intrude. Even the great energy in the third piece – ‘bold and with fire’ - Schumann never hints at anger but is exultant and poetic.
Glazunov (1865 – 1936) was a Russian composer in the Romantic tradition. In these two pieces Elégie and Chant du Ménestrel he takes advantage of the singing qualities of the cello. The former is a memorial for the lately departed Anton Rubinstein and Tchaikovsky; tinged with sadness but full of uplift befitting these two icons of Russian music. French troubadours roved around the countryside in the 12th and 13th centuries singing of courtly love and true to form Glazunov’s Chant du menestrel, is a beautiful song that shows off the cello’s vocal qualities. It was a favourite piece of the legendary cellist Pablo Casals.
Brahms’s Cello Sonata No 2 in F major Op. 99 despite being the work of an older man is music with all the passion and sweep of youth. Brahms doesn’t hold back! The Sonata was composed for the cellist Hausmann, who was renowned for his large and virile tone. The whole piece challenges the cello to hold its own with Brahms unleashed at the piano! Despite this the sonata ends, like the Second Piano Concerto, almost startling in its lightness of touch, unexpected within this massive framework. It is one of the most joyful pieces in the repertoire and is quite rightly held as a highpoint in late nineteenth-century chamber music.
EVENT 2
Friday 19 September – 7:30pm
National Centre for Early Music, St Margaret’s Church, Walmgate
Tickets £20 (18 and under free)
Concert by Festival Artists
Charlotte Scott,
Jonathan Stone (violins)
Hélène Clément,
Gary Pomeroy (violas)
Jonathan Aasgaard,
Tim Lowe (cellos)
Joseph Haydn
String Quartet Op. 76 No.5 ‘Largo’
Dimitri Shostakovich
String Quartet No. 8 in C minor, opus 110
Arnold Schoenberg
String Sextet Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) Op. 4
When he was free from his contract at the Esterházy court Haydn made two lengthy visits to London. What Haydn discovered there was nothing like the intimate salon of the Esterházy court but an 800-seat hall buzzing with all sorts of people, attentive and excited. In the concerts that included symphonies Haydn conjured string quartets with clear textures, virtuosic playing - especially the first violin – brilliant and wonderfully tuneful; attention grabbing!
Back in Vienna the city was under threat of invasion from Napoleon. Despite the political crisis, perhaps because of it, Haydn wrote what was to be his final set of six quartets (Op.76) pouring into them all his long understanding of the inner life of the string quartet - played by virtuoso professional musicians and a heightened sense of musical emotion showing to the French invaders the genius of central European music. Even the super-confident Beethoven held back from writing string quartets respectful of Haydn’s gift. Op.76 No.5 is the last but one of his lifetime achievement of 68 string quartets.
Shostakovich lived his life in perpetual political crisis, mostly in the USSR’s soulless, bleak and violent Stalin era. His music is indelibly imprinted by his need to survive. Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 8 in C minor comprises a mere twenty minutes of non-stop music, written in three days in 1960 as a distraction from his official project to write a film score about the Dresden fire bombings of WWII. The work has since become one of the most important string quartets of the 20th century, well known, frequently performed, extensively discussed. Vivid, dramatic, mesmerizing and devastating, this compact but dense quartet contains a lifetime of music: the life and music of Dmitri Shostakovich.
The young Schoenberg’s string sextet Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) is a late-Romantic outpouring of intense, sensual emotion for he had recently fallen head over heels in love with his future wife Mathilde Zemlinsky. The music has a strong resonance of Brahms’s late chamber music - with its abstract development of motifs - and also of the harmonic language of Wagner, the great story teller. But it also points strongly to the modernist aesthetic which Schoenberg championed against the stagnant, commercialized, popular culture that dominated fin de siècle Vienna, his native city. His discovery of a volume of poetry Weib und Welt (Woman and World) by the poet Richard Dehmel opened his eyes to modernist themes of transformation implying that modernity and innovation were essential to cultural change.
Schoenberg’s string sextet Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) sets Dehmel’s poem of the same name to music, tracing a walk of two lovers through the night as she explains that she is pregnant by another man.
EVENT 3
Saturday 20 September 1:00 – 2:00pm
Unitarian Chapel, St Saviourgate
Tickets £15 (18 and under free)
Viola recital
Hélène Clément (viola)
Katya Apekisheva (piano)
Frank Bridge*
Two Pieces for Viola and Piano: Pensiero and Allego Appassionato
Dimitri Shostakovich
Sonata for Viola and Piano, Op. 147
Rebecca Clarke
Sonata for Viola and Piano
Before the slaughter of World War One changed everything for Frank Bridge he wrote beautiful pastoral music in the English tradition. Among Bridge’s early miniatures Pensiero and Allegro Appassionato were written on commission from the renown viola player Lionel Tertis. Written around 1906, they provide a lovely showcase for Bridge’s early style. Very much a reflection of their time and place. Both pieces evoke a haunting mixture of French impressionism, English folk modality and an atmosphere of wistful reverie.
* Hélène plays on the viola that used to belong to Frank Bridge (and then Benjamin Britten) so what could be better than to hear her play these beautiful pieces on his very own instrument?
Shostakovich’s Viola Sonata was his last work, and there is good reason to suppose that he knew it would be. He composed the greater part of it in June and July 1975 and died, of lung cancer, on 9 August (he was a chain smoker all his adult life). Like the String Quartet N o.8, it has a strong autobiographical element to it but the piece is also a homage to Beethoven. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata pervades the long finale, which is the emotional core of the piece. It is slow throughout and feels like a meditation for the viola, with the piano supplying just a sparse, broken-chord accompaniment and long, bell-tone bass notes, both reminiscent of Beethoven’s work. The mood is difficult to define: not angry, not optimistic, but certainly not despondent either—perhaps weary, perhaps even consoling (the sonata ends on a major chord) perhaps transcendence in the final notes that he was ever to write, Shostakovich left us music of the calm acceptance of life’s last, inevitable experience.
With Rebecca Clarke’s Viola Sonata we return to the English pastoral vision of Vaughn Williams and Elgar. As a student at the Royal College of Music, she switched to the viola, a not unusual path to follow on the advice of her composition teacher, the renowned Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, which was shrewd advice because she became one of the first women to support herself as a professional viola player.
Easily Clarke’s most impressive and well-known of her works the sonata was written in 1918/19. She entered it in an American competition under a nom de plume, ‘Anthony Trent’, but when it was revealed the composer was a woman, overnight Clarke became a cause célèbre both in England and America.
A passionate three-movement sonata, the work roves across the viola’s whole range, making the most of its intense sound in the upper reaches and the huskier tones on its lowest string. Clarke’s voice is distinctive, rooted in the Austro-German tradition yet also steeped in a love of the English pastoralists, especially Vaughan Williams and like Frank Bridge (also a professional violist) is strongly influenced by French ‘impressionist’ composers Ravel and also Debussy. On a visit to Hawaii, Clarke heard a gamelan orchestra, and these sounds also echo in the Sonata.
In 1939 Rebecca Clarke visited America, and was there when war was declared. She was denied a return visa and thus forced to stay in the USA. She met John Friskin with whom she had been a student at the Royal College of Music and who was now teaching at the Juilliard School. They were both unmarried and in their late fifties so decided to marry. Rebecca remained in New York until her death in 1979.
EVENT 4
Saturday 20 September 7:30pm
Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, University of York
Tickets £20 (18 and under free)
Concert by Festival Artists
Charlotte Scott,
Jonathan Stone (violins)
Hélène Clément,
Gary Pomeroy (violas)
Jonathan Aasgaard,
Tim Lowe ('cellos)
Katya Apekisheva (piano)
Franz Schubert
Notturno in E Flat, Op. 148, D. 897
Robert Schumann
Piano Quartet in E flat major, Op. 47
Pyotr Tchaikovsky
Piano Trio in A minor, Op. 50
In this concert we play the music of some of the greatest song-writers in the classical repertoire. The lovely Notturno in E Flat was composed during the last year of Schubert’s life. It is thought that it was intended to serve as the second movement of the B Flat Major Piano Trio (D.899). For whatever reason it was discarded and so we have the benefit of a ‘spare’ Schubert andante (the title Notturno was added by the publisher). Perhaps on its own, its brevity and in the shadow of the awesome B Flat trio, this single movement is not nearly as well-known as it should be because it is quintessentially ‘late Schubert’.
In 1842 Robert Schumann was in a good place having at long last married Clara Wieck. Free now from the problems that had beset him he turned to writing chamber music. He completed the three string quartets in about six weeks, and later in 1842 the awesome Piano Quintet Op. 44 and during November the Piano Quartet. The Piano Quartet feels like the composer was in a reverie; a dream state expressed in sound in which nothing prosaic or ugly is allowed, just pure beauty. These days the Piano Quartet is recognized as the culmination of the piano quartet as a genre; the harbinger for later composers to build on.
Scaling down to small-scale ensembles was a problem for Tchaikovsky and it was against his better judgement that the Trio was written at the behest of his benefactor, the widow Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck. But the real motivation for carrying on with the project was in memory of his old friend and mentor, Nikolai Rubinstein, who died suddenly at a young age. Rubinstein had been Director of the Moscow Conservatoire as well as a famous pianist and composer and had been a major force in Russian musical life.
Elegiac works in the Russian tradition tend to be massive and this one is no exception. Tchaikovsky seems still to be thinking in orchestral terms and the palette of sound he conjures from the three players is extraordinary. Needless to say the piece is replete with Tchaikovsky’s genius for sumptuous tunes and long, expansive perorations during the more elegiac moments. And just for good measure the second movement includes 11 variations that recall Rubinstein’s personality and incidents in his long friendship with the composer. This is a truly an epic piece wrung out of a violin, a cello and a piano.
EVENT 5
Sunday 21 September 3.00pm
St Olave’s Church, Marygate Lane
Tickets £20 (18 and under free)
Concert by Festival Artists
Charlotte Scott,
Jonathan Stone (violins)
Hélène Clément,
Gary Pomeroy (violas)
Jonathan Aasgaard,
Tim Lowe ('cellos)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
String Quintet No. 1 in B flat major K174
Johannes Brahms
String Quintet No. 2 in G Major, op. 111
Both Mozart and Brahms were attracted to the idea of an additional viola to the standard string quartet. Their motivation was basically the same – to add a darker texture to the inner voice of the ensemble; so giving their compositional palette more and different sounds. In this concert, at one extreme we have the seventeen year old Mozart’s quintet, one of his first recognised chamber music pieces and at the other the fifty-seven year old Brahms claiming that his String Quintet in G major, No. 2 Op. 111 was going to be his last ever composed work (in fact it wasn’t).
For Mozart the viola was his own instrument of choice when he played chamber music with friends. He loved the dusky sound of the instrument. He had heard the charming viola quintet by his Salzburg friend Michael Haydn (younger brother of Joseph) Notturno, an evocation of night. Mozart was keen to work in a medium that enabled him to explore inner part writing (the violas natural domain) and to indulge his fondness for the viola’s darker textures. Mozart’s recently written ‘Viennese Quartets’, K168–173 (never published in his lifetime) had a consciously ‘intellectual’ tone but the String Quintet in B flat major K174 is much more relaxed in the style of a divertimento and is more spaciously conceived than the quartets. So the teenage Wolfgang is clearly already revealing his genius for sonority, colour, wit and inventiveness, all baked into this delightful piece; hardly ‘early Mozart’ but an already fully formed genius.
In the summer of 1890 Brahms was out of the heat of Vienna staying in a favoured spot, the countryside east of Salzburg (location for the ‘Sound of Music’). There in his contentment he composed what his biographer Walter Niemann called “the most passionate, the freshest, and the most deeply inspired by nature” of all his works—the String Quintet No. 2 in G Major, op. 111. The fifty-seven year old told his publisher after the first performance that this was to be his last composition “With this letter you can bid farewell to my music…” Originally envisaged as sketches for a fifth symphony it ended as a string quintet with two violas. At any rate, the G major quintet is a breath-taking piece, almost orchestral in conception, creating the effect of far more than five instruments.
This is especially the case with the long first movement. The other three are all much shorter and all have a distinctive gypsy or Slavonic element. An infectious driving builds into a moto perpetuo rush towards the end erupting into another Brahms signature; an inexhaustible Hungarian dance - accents, trills, a dashing motif and finishing with a gigantic chord of 13 notes – an exhilarating and joyous conclusion to Brahms’s career (so he thought*) and a fitting way to end York Chamber Music Festival 2025.
* when he heard the celebrated clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld at Meiningen the following spring Brahms’s resolve to retire was broken! He took up his pen to produce his resplendent Indian summer works among them the Clarinet Trio (Op.114) and Quintet (Op. 115) and the fantasies and intermezzos for piano (opp. 116–119).
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