Chamber Classics

“The debt to Beethoven is evident in the dramatic opening of the first movement, alongside a lightness of foot that is all Schubert.”

“Boulanger was making the most of student life when she wrote this piece…that exuberance infuses every note.”

Brahms was uncharacteristically pleased with the trio, writing to his publisher, “You have not yet had such a beautiful trio from me and very likely have not published its equal in the last ten years.”

Dora Pejačević is without doubt one of the most significant musical voices of the early twentieth century.

This is a journey piece. About travel. Maybe a long way or at night. Taken to an unfamiliar destination.

‘It’s frightfully melancholy,’ Debussy wrote to Godet. ‘I don’t know if one should laugh at it or cry? Perhaps both?’

There’s a languid, sun-kissed feel to Camille Saint-Saëns’ Fantasie for violin and harp that may well reflect the composer’s state of mind when he composed it.

A fanfare-like flute melody announces Ludwig van Beethoven’s cheery Opus 25 Serenade, violin and viola soon responding in kind.

The Quintet is suffused with what Edward Said, discussing late style in general, described as a ‘mature subjectivity, stripped of hubris and pomposity, unashamed either of its fallibility or of the modest assurance it has gained as a result of age,’ writes Gordon Kerry.

“Dvořák’s Eight Waltzes, Op. 54…are wonderfully original, and range in mood from the wistful to the boisterous,” writes Phillip Sametz.