Anton Hanson, violin
Jules Dussap, violin
Gabrielle Lafait, viola
Simon Dechambre, cello
Les Hanson, a French quartet founded in 2013, winners of the Geneva Competition, awarded a Diapason d’or and a Choc Classica for their Haydn disc, have set themselves the goal of exploring the riches of the quartet repertoire. For this concert in Listrac-Médoc, they take us to Czechoslovakia where Leoš Janáček, a well-informed russophile, read Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata as soon as it was published in 1908 in the original edition. The short story inspired him to write a Piano Trio, now lost, but whose material he will reuse in 1925 for his first quartet. Commissioned by the Czech Quartet, one of the largest chamber ensembles of the time, the work is deliberately brutal, structured in highly contrasting blocks with harsh sonorities. Janáček plays on the two poles of diatonism and chromaticism, associated respectively with joy and disorder. Schumann was more inclined towards joy in 1842, the “year of chamber music”. It was a happy time, two years after his marriage to Clara and a year after the birth of their first daughter, and the German composer was in an intense creative phase. His second quartet, like the first, was written in four days. We hear the dreamer Eusebius, the second side of his personality. Schumann frees the form to let his lyricism and emotion run free, approaching the last quartets of Beethoven.
Program :
Leoš Janáček, String Quartet No. 1, Kreutzer Sonata
Schumann, Quartet No. 2, in F major, Op. 41
