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On the 31st October we will begin our 4 concert series “After Beethoven” at the Wigmore Hall in London
The idea came to us as we were coming to the end of our Beethoven project. It had been an extraordinary and profoundly changing experience. We were wondering what it must have been like, back then, for audiences to discover Beethoven’s quartets, and in what ways the music world was changed by them. Composers writing string quartets now had Beethoven’s monumental legacy to live up to, not only in terms of the quality of the music but also of the unbelievable development which it encompassed. This would remain intimidating for many of them, and all would be influenced by it in one way or another.
The question of how to follow on from Beethoven was addressed in radically different ways by composers, each coming up with their own solutions by turning to sometimes opposite means of expression. So we’ve arranged each of our programmes around a group of composers (not necessarily all from the same era or part of the world) that seem to us to embrace similar ways of dealing with this challenge Beethoven’s footsteps by developing and expanding his musical language, pushing its boundaries further and in different directions.
Our first concert “In Beethoven’s Footsteps” includes Webern “Langsamer Satz”, Bartok 4 and Brahms Op51,2.
