Monday at Last with with String Sextet

In Monday at Last, violinist Cecilia Zilliacus and cellist Kati Raitinen welcome guest performers and present both newer and older works. At this concert, we become acquainted with Swedish cellist Kristina Winiarski and German violinist Carolin Widmann in a programme spanning from eighteenth-century France to today, with music by Swiss-Dutch composer and violinist Helena Winkelman.

This richly contrasting programme begins with exhilarated, melancholy, dancing music by Jean-Marie Leclair (who was murdered under unclear circumstances in Paris in 1764), and continues with new music by Swiss-Dutch composer and violinist Helena Winkelman. We also hear music by this season’s featured composer, Jörg Widmann, one of the most frequently played composers of our time and brother of violinist Carolin Widmann. His imaginative music is often associated with familiar classical and romantic composers, such as Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms, but at the same time, it is unmistakably rooted in our era.

The latter half of the concert gathers the full string sextet. We hear Richard Strauss’ atmospheric string sextet, which begins his last opera, Capriccio. Next, we hear the intense and fervent sextet by Prague-born Erwin Schulhoff, who was an exciting name in the European art and music scene in the early decades of the twentieth century. His teachers included Claude Debussy and Max Reger, and he was inspired early on by jazz and the artistic pursuits of the Dadaists.