Shadow and light – Beethoven 250
Chiaroscuro Quartet

Chamber Music

Thursday, 23 July 2020
7.30 pm, Lauenen Church

The guiding idea behind the new “Menuhin’s Heritage Artists” project is to support particularly promising young artists over an extended period of time and to offer the public the opportunity to watch them blossom over the course of years. Led by violinist Alina Ibragimova (one of Lord Menuhin’s last students), the Chiaroscuro Quartet is one of the first to embody this enterprise. It has enjoyed this special status since 2017, and this year - Beethoven's anniversary – it has chosen to tackle one of the greatest works of quartet literature: Opus 130 by the brilliant genius from Bonn. Made up of six movements, the work originally ended with the famous Grand Fugue, which Beethoven, faced with the public's incomprehension, decided to replace with an Allegro. This visionary quartet is preceded by two carefully selected pages representing two key periods in the evolution of the form: the Baroque period with Henry Purcell and his emblematic viol consorts, and the Classical period with Joseph Haydn, considered the father of the “modern” quartet.