Program
Arnold Schönberg (1874–1951)
String sextet Verklärte Nacht / Enlightened Night, ор. 4 (1899)
Franz Schubert (1797–1828)
String quartet № 14 Der Tod und das Mädchen / Death and the Maiden, D 810 (1824)
Performers – the soloists of the musicAeterna orchestra:
Dmitry Borodin, first violin
Ivan Subbotkin, second violin
Grigory Chekmarev, first viola
Dinara Muratova, second viola (viola in Schubert’s quartet)
Vladimir Slovachevsky, first cello (cello in Schubert’s quartet)
Maxim Akchurin, second cello
Details
The programme by the musicAeterna orchestra soloists combines two famous chamber ensemble compositions, one of which opens, and the other closes the era of Romanticism in music. Schubert’s string quartet “Death and the Maiden” lets poetry into the formerly strict classicist genre of pure music, whereas Schönberg with his string sextet “Enlightened Night” sums up the late Romantic style and introduces “neologisms” into it which later would lead to the birth of the new, atonal music. Both masterpieces have hidden literary programmes that clarify while at the same time obscure their complex content.