With the Brodsky Quartet, you can count on sophisticated and surprising programmes. Thursday 19 May (in Nijmegen) and Saturday 21 May (in Amsterdam) they join forces with Finnish mezzo-soprano Virpi Räisänen and perform works by Respighi, Shostakovich and Wantenaar.
The Nijmeegse Stichting voor Kamermuziek was supposed to celebrate its 70th anniversary in 2020. Now that we can finally enjoy live music in the concert hall again, a celebration will still be held with a concert by the world-renowned Brodsky Quartet and mezzo-soprano Virpi Räisänen. Among other things, they will perform a brand new composition in beautiful neoclassical by Mathilde Wantenaar. The Dutch composer has been making a name for herself for several years with inventive compositions that also appeal to a wide audience. Her composition ‘Seufzer’, for instance, written for soprano Johannette Zomer as part of her ‘Bach2Ways’ project, was extensively discussed in the radio programme ‘De Schatkamer’ by (at the time) Composer of the Fatherland Willem Jeths. In tonight's string quartet, she again touches on this theme of fear and despair that speaks from the text of Bach's 21st cantata. At two-thirds of the piece, notes from ‘Seufzer’ were given a place again. ‘There is a kind of shadow Baroque’ the composer tells us when asked ’there are Baroque-like passages, but also freer ones that could be called a-tonal. Some passages, on the contrary, are very soft and tonal, like at the end with the words ‘Erfreue Dich Seele’, but this is rudely broken up. The music becomes more barren, the breath, as it were, falters and what remains is pure oppression and desperation: ‘Hier ist ja lauter Nacht.’