Description
For this concert we perform fantastical works by Schubert and Schumann, with the intense and remarkable quintet by Weinberg. Schubert wrote his Fantasia for piano four hands (two players at one piano) in the last year of his life and dedicated it to his pupil Caroline Esterházy. Schumann’s string quartet Op. 41 No. 3 (one of only three that Schumann wrote, in quick succession) was also given a dedication – this time to Mendelssohn whom the younger composer had met in 1835. Polish Jewish composer Mieczysław Weinberg escaped from his homeland to the Soviet Union in 1939, where he studied at the Minsk Conservatory and later moved to Moscow and became friends with Shostakovich. His Piano Quintet, composed in 1944, is the work of a composer whose independent creative voice is revered by violinist Gidon Kremer as one of the most valuable of the 20th century.