Concerts

Chamber music has always been, at its heart, a social art. Unlike the symphony or the concerto, it does not require an institution or a hall full of strangers to come alive. It requires only a small number of people who trust one another enough to listen and respond. At its best, chamber music is a conversation, and the most charged conversations happen between people who know each other deeply.

Both works on tonight's programme were written not for the concert hall but for specific people in specific rooms: a piano student, a clarinettist friend, a beloved son. What you...

By the time Felix Draeseke died in 1913, the musical world he had grown up in had already begun to disappear. Schoenberg had written his first atonal works. Debussy had remade the harmonic language of France. Stravinsky was about to premiere The Rite of Spring. Composers who had spent their careers within the certainties of tonality and Romantic expression found themselves as relics of a previous age.

The three composers on tonight's programme each lived through this transformation and, in their own way, held their ground. They are not grouped here because they failed to understand what was happening around...

We tend to think of composers as a distinct category: people who sit at desks, write music, and leave performance to others. But for most of music history, that separation barely existed. The composers on tonight's programme were, first and foremost, working performers. They played for a living, toured extensively, held positions in major orchestras and opera houses, and composed not as their primary vocation but as a natural extension of their performing lives.

What follows from that is audible in the music. Each of these composers knew their instrument from the inside out, knew exactly what it could do...

Carl Maria von Weber died in London on 5 June 1826, at the age of thirty-nine, two months after conducting the triumphant premiere of his final opera Oberon at Covent Garden. The effort of completing the work and travelling to England in failing health proved fatal. Richard Wagner, who credited Weber with being the father of Romantic opera, later funded and arranged for Weber’s remains to be brought from London to Dresden, a gesture that speaks clearly of what Weber meant to the generation that followed him.

Weber occupies a peculiar position in the history of music: central to everything...