Repertoire
HAYDN: String Quartet No. 3 in C major, “The Bird” op. 33
BARTÓK: String Quartet No. 1 in A minor, op. 7
BRAHMS: Piano Quintet in F minor, op. 34
Artists
Vera Martínez, violin
Abel Tomàs, violin
Jonathan Brown, viola
Arnau Tomàs, cello
Alexander Melnikov, piano
Program
The Casals Quartet remains faithful to its annual date with L’Auditori’s Chamber Music season. On this occasion, they will join one of the world’s greatest stars of the piano, the Russian Alexander Melnikov, to perform Johannes Brahms’ Piano Quintet in F minorThe Casals Quartet remains faithful to its annual date with L’Auditori’s Chamber Music season. After the complete Beethoven quartets that they offered us last season and now established as one of the most important string quartets on the scene at present, they team up on this occasion with one of the world’s greatest stars of the piano, the Russian Alexander Melnikov, to perform Johannes Brahms’ Piano Quintet in F minor, a masterwork of the chamber music repertoire. Brahms, a compulsive perfectionist, took a long time to find the right instrumentation for his quintet, but once he had, he composed one of his most well-rounded works, with a balance of timbre that highlights the individual melodic lines, notwithstanding the constant superimpositions of voice to which the themes are subject. The Casals Quartet will round off the repertoire with Franz Joseph Haydn’s String Quartet in C major and Béla Bartók’s String Quartet No. 1, two of their favourite composers and fundamental for understanding the evolution of the genre: the first, considered its founding father; the second, pivotal in helping to bring about its resurgence in the 20th century.