Sunday 21 September 3:00pm
£20.00 (18 and under free)
Venue: St Olave’s Church, YO30 7DT

Concert by Festival Artists

Both Mozart and Brahms were attracted to the idea if 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 the String Quintet in B flat major K174 the seventeen year old Wolfgang is clearly already revealing his genius for sonority, colour, wit and inventiveness, baked into this delightful piece; hardly ‘early Mozart’ but an already fully formed genius.

At the other extreme the fifty-seven year old Brahms claimed that his String Quintet No. 2 in G major, Op. 111 was going to be his last ever composed work (in fact it wasn’t). His biographer Walter Niemann called it, “… the most passionate, the freshest, and the most deeply inspired by nature of all his works”. It is indeed 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 inexhaustible Hungarian dance brings the piece to an exhilarating and joyous conclusion – accents, trills, a dashing motif and a gigantic chord of 13 notes to finish; and so Brahms thought, wrongly, to end his career.

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