Kammermusik am Picassoplatz

Under the title ‘Literary’ Quartet, this programme brings together three works whose scores are closely interwoven with biographical and literary narratives. The programme opens with Anton Webern’s *Langsamer Satz* for string quartet. Composed in 1905 under the influence of a mountain hike with his future wife Wilhelmine, the work translates a private experience of nature into a late-Romantic, highly emotional musical language. Sergei Prokofiev’s String Quartet No. 2 reflects a different kind of landscape: his encounter with Caucasian folk music during his evacuation in the Second World War. The work reads like a travel diary and combines archaic folklore with the stark motoric drive of modernism. The programme concludes with Leoš Janáček’s String Quartet No. 1, explicitly subtitled after Tolstoy’s short story The Kreutzer Sonata. Here, Janáček sets to music not merely a plot, but the psychological drama of an obsessive passion.