Friday 19 September 7:30pm – 9:30pm
£20.00 (18 and under free)
Venue: NCEM, YO1 9TL

Concert by Festival Artists

Having encountered 800 seat venues in London Haydn started writing attention grabbing string quartets. Back in Vienna the city was under threat of invasion from Napoleon’s army. Haydn rose to the occasion and wrote string quartets to be proud of! 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 Stalin’s soulless and violent USSR, hoping somehow to survive. His String Quartet No. 8 was written at white-hot speed in three days in 1960. Vivid, dramatic, mesmerizing and devastating, the quartet contains Shostakovich’s life in a musical nutshell.
All six of our stellar cast of string players are on stage to play Schoenberg’s string sextet Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night). It is a late-Romantic outpouring of intense, sensual emotion; tracing a walk of two lovers through the night as she explains that she is pregnant by another man.

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