On this concert’s programme, two of the greatest masterpieces of the quartet repertoire: one of Beethoven’s late string quartets (N. 14 in C♯ minor, Op. 131 – 1826), played after György Kurtág’s second string quartet “Officium breve” (“Brief office” or “Brief liturgy”), in memoriam Andrea Servansky, composed in 1988/89.

György Kurtág came and stayed in Paris several months at the end of the 1950s to study with Messiaen. He attended the Domaine Musical concerts, headed by Pierre Boulez, and was deeply influenced by Stockhausen and Webern - among others. Webern’s music inspired his own style; elliptic, dense and concise to the extreme, and yet deeply anchored in the entire history of string quartet. Density and modernism are also what characterize Beethoven’s last quartets, vividly innovative and that his contemporaries failed to understand.

For the Quatuor op. 131, Beethoven conceived seven distinctive movements, running without a break –but including some movements written only to link them all together– freely jumping from a peaceful landscape (a slow fugue at the very beginning of the work) to a vivid dance, or moments of silence, used as a breaking, almost violent, device. 

Picture: © Elena Bauer / OnP