Cuarteto Casals | BEETHOVEN 250

The third edition of Ludwig van Beethoven's last quartets (after the concerts on September 16 and November 18) are interpretations of numbers 14 and 15. Today, we will describe how personal these works are. It even seems that these compositions are not only music but also thought and emotion diaries intended for reading and exploring.

We will start with the third movement of the Quartet in A minor, above which Beethoven wrote: The Holy Song of Thanksgiving from the Survivor to the Deity. It opens with chords played without vibrato, as if imitating a chorale played on the organ. It was created as a result of the events of April 1825. The composer fell ill with severe abdominal ailments. Having found inflammation of the intestine, which could prove fatal, the doctor prescribed a strict diet. It excluded wine, coffee and spices, among other things. I promise you that if you drink any alcoholic beverages, you will lie weak and exhausted within a few hours, said the doctor. Beethoven recovered, but he knew he was close to death.

As for the Quartet in C sharp minor, we will give the floor to Jerzy Kleczyński, who reported a Warsaw concert in 1890 in the 'Echo Muzyczne', a Warsaw magazine: The Beethoven quartet was a real feast for musicians, especially those who studied the master's last quartets and are not discouraged by their eccentric form. In these works, the great master follows his own bold tracks – his spirit, detached from the ground, bathed in the splendours of the ideal, presents itself in a strangely overexposed, associated with some foreign to the contemporary sphere.

Cuarteto Casals will read these journals of Beethoven's feelings. The ensemble was founded in 1997 in Madrid. Apart from the cycle of all Beethoven's quartets, its repertoire includes all late Mozart quartets, as well as projects concerning Hungarian composers: Bartók, Ligeti and Kurtág. It has repeatedly performed in the most prestigious concert halls in the world, including Carnegie Hall, Philharmonie Cologne, Cité de la Musique Paris, Schubertiade in Schwarzenberg and Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. The ensemble's significant discography includes twelve albums released by the Harmonia Mundi label with repertoire from lesser-known Spanish composers Arriaga and Toldrá, through the Viennese classics Mozart, Haydn, Schubert and Brahms to the great 20th century: Debussy, Ravel and Zemlinsky.