In a recital from the 2008 Verbier Festival, two talented yet distinct groups of musicians join pianist Nicholas Angelich for performances of two masterworks of the chamber music repertoire: composed 150 years apart, Mozart’s Second Piano Quartet and Ernst von Dohnányi's Sextet both pushed the boundaries of performers’ and listeners’ imaginations and technical capabilities.
A rare musical genre during the Viennese Classical era, the Piano Quartet (performed here by Henning Kraggerud, Yuri Bashmet, and Miklos Perenyi) was composed by Mozart for his own use at concerts, the continuation of a project initially commissioned by his publisher Hoffmeister but then canceled because of the incredible challenges posed by the works to amateur players. Julian Rachlin, Leonard Elschenbroich, Lawrence Power, Martin Fröst, and David Guerrier join Angelich for the 1935 Sextet for clarinet, horn, string trio, and piano by Ernst von Dohnányi, a pianist, conductor, and composer strongly influenced by Brahms’s German Romanticism, whose strains run throughout this expansive and beautiful work.
