Chamber music with Roberto González-Monjas

On this early summer evening in June, the Musikkollegium Winterthur ensemble, conducted by Roberto González-Monjas, will guide you through the world of French chamber music. After decades of relative obscurity following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, this genre experienced a new heyday – composers such as Camille Saint-Saëns and Vincent d’Indy sought to break free from German models such as the piano quartets of Mendelssohn, Schumann or Brahms. Saint-Saëns’ Piano Quartet, premiered in 1875 at the Société nationale de musique, was a clear call to his young fellow composers to counter ‘Musique germanique’ with an equivalent work in one of its own domains. Gabriel Fauré heeded this call and began writing his first piano quartet just one year later. The result is something entirely unique: a work that is at once spontaneous and graceful, never extreme yet full of immense tension, gripping yet always elegant, melancholic yet not depressive.
Maurice Ravel devoted himself entirely to an aesthetic of sound. His ten-minute occasional work ‘Introduction et Allegro’ is a masterpiece of instrumentation. The unusual instrumentation for a septet, with the harp at its centre, suggests an orchestral richness in which the Spanish exoticism so typical of Ravel is not lacking. The third French work is also the most famous: Paul Dukas’s setting of Goethe’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” gained widespread recognition beyond the concert hall, primarily through its use in Walt Disney’s “Fantasia”. The work’s central motif – the flood of water unleashed by the apprentice – also establishes a connection to Toru Takemitsu’s ‘Toward the Sea’: Commissioned by Greenpeace for the “Save the Whales” campaign, this impressionistic tone poem is a tribute “to the sea that creates all things”.