Kammerkonzert: Streichquartett

This chamber concert offers a moving journey through music history. Charles Gounod, in the 19th century, famously said about the work of the most significant Baroque composer: "If all music were to be lost in a flood, and only Bach's would be saved, then we would still have all the elements of musical art." Few successors have not engaged with a work as monumental as Bach's "The Art of Fugue," although this remained a fragmentary torso in 1749 – and in it, Bach exhausted the possibilities of a single theme. Beethoven studied Bach's compositions intensively to gain inspiration and find his own path, culminating in a revolutionary work in chamber music, such as his 15th string quartet: He wrote it in 1825 after the premiere of his ninth symphony, and even in the final movement, the famous melody of the line "O friends, not these tones" appears in an inversion. The autobiographical centerpiece is the emotional middle movement with the unusual title "Hymn of Thanksgiving from a Recovered Person." Shostakovich then considered both composers to be great idols and points of reference: he called Bach "the genius of music," and his study was dominated by a Beethoven bust. His ninth string quartet, which was created in 1964, follows a cyclical principle: everything leads to the conclusion, which picks up on previous material and unfolds a breathtaking fugue over the main theme of the introduction – as Shostakovich once said: "Melody is a thought, it is a movement, it is the soul of a musical piece."