Mathilde Borsarello Hermann, violin
Bleuenn Le Maitre, violin
Cécile Grassi, viola
Guillaume Martigné, cello
Beethoven was 19 years old when he composed the Quartet Op. 18 No. 6, and one can already sense the beginnings of a revolution. After three movements full of rhythmic and melodic innovations, the Finale begins with a slow introduction entitled “La Malinconia” (melancholy), an extraordinary parenthesis which Boucourechliev said opened “like a doorway to a new world. Boucourechliev said that it opened “like a wound in the body of the work”. It was under the shock of the German composer’s quartets that Guillaume Lekeu tackled the genre in 1886-1887, for the third time when he was only 17 years old. He introduces his Molto adagio with the words of Christ in the garden of Gethsemane, “My soul is sorrowful unto death” (Mt, 38, 26), giving his music a form of meditation on disappearance in which time stretches and becomes blurred. The cello plays a central role, chanting a prayer in a pulse that has become almost smooth.
The Psophos, winners of the 2001 Bordeaux International String Quartet Competition, will end the concert with another early work, Mendelssohn’s Opus 13. Mendelssohn’s first published quartet, it too is a response to the upheaval caused by the Beethovenian scores. A program conceived around the heritage but above all innovation, a notion familiar to the four musicians who in September 2021 imagined a tour of Brittany on electric bikes…
No place could be better suited to symbolize this alliance between heritage and innovation than the circular cellar of Château Lafite Rothschild, built under the direction of architect Ricardo Bofill…
