Description
From classical music to jewish cabaret
In 1977, the space probe Voyager left our planet with a CD on board that NASA predicts will outlive humanity and its Sun. The 31 tracks on the CD invite the otherwise silent Universe (and its potential unknown inhabitants) to listen to the sounds of the Earth – its languages, its natural sounds and its music. It’s unclear how the tracks on the CD were chosen, however after playing children’s laughter, Chinese flutes, a Navajo evening song and other various classical works, the recording ends with the fifth movement – Cavatina – of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 13, considered by generations of commentators to be one of the peaks of western chamber music.
Often, numbers are misleading. This B-flat quartet, despite being listed thirteenth out of a total of fifteen, is chronologically the last to have been composed by Beethoven at the end of 1825. Differing immensely from his earlier works, yet still close to traditional classical models, the dense substance of this last quartet exhibits a prodigious and unambiguous inventiveness. Consisting of six contrasting movements – a very unusual structure for the time – this piece shocked its first listeners to such an extent that the embarrassed publisher convinced Beethoven to write an alternative finale and to separately print the stunning “great fugue”, which succeeded the Cavatina and originally ended the 45 minutes of intense music.
In 40,000 years, the celestial version of the Cavatina will reach its first star. Paying homage to this slow interstellar drift, the Jerusalem Quartet will perform the quartet in its entirety, as well as the great original fugue. They will also be joined by soprano Hilla Baggio for a premiere by contemporary composer Leonid Desjatnikov, and it’s safe to assume that this Jewish cabaret, an exaltation of Jewish culture and its “crying laughter”, though deprived of space flight, will resonate high and wide in the night and meet Beethoven somewhere in the universe above.
There will be a presentation before the concert at 16h00 by Marie Favre, musicologist.
Program
Ludwig van Beethoven / String Quartet N° 13 in B-flat major - op. 130
Ludwig van Beethoven / Grosse Fuge - op. 133
Leonid Desjatnikov / "Yiddish" - 5 songs for String Quartet and Soprano
Artists
Concert venue
rue du Vieux Collège 22
1950 Sion
Switzerland