IKFU Evening Concert

photo: Majanka Fotografie

The concert that concludes Sunday brings almost all of Janine Jansen’s great music friends who are present this edition on stage. In different formations they offer a varied program that revolves around the music from the first decades of the twentieth century. Works by Richard Strauss, Alban Berg and Erich Wolfgang Korngold sketch the infectious atmosphere of lost romanticism and expressive new paths.

With the string sextet Capriccio and the Sonata for violin and piano, the musicians present the career of Richard Strauss in a nutshell. His romantic Sonata, played today by Janine Jansen and Alexandre Kantorow, dates from 1887 and his sextet is based on his last opera Capriccio from 1942. These are notes from a man who looks back nostalgically at how it all was before music changed so drastically in the first half of the twentieth century, or so it seems.

Around 1930, Arnold Schoenberg and Korngold were considered the most important Austrian composers. Musically, they are polar opposites. Where Schoenberg promoted the twelve-tone technique, Korngold remained a romantic. In his Suite for two violins, cello and piano left hand, written in 1930, he also looks back longingly on the nineteenth century. In that respect, the works of Alban Berg are the perfect symbiosis between the styles of Korngold and Schoenberg.