Lucerne Festival Strings Recital: Lismore Music Festival

Über die Veranstaltung

The Lismore Music Festival presents a recital featuring the renowned Lucerne Festival Strings performing Erwin Schulhoff's String Quartet No.1, Bartok's Romanian Folk Dances and Dvorak's American String Quartet No. 12 at St. Carthage's Cathedral.

Schulhoff's 1924 String Quartet No. 1 was written shortly after his return to Prague, the city of his birth. His String Quartet No. 1 came in between the periods of his experimentation with atonality and other progressive methods (1919‐1923), and the extreme simplification of his style that marked his compositions after 1931. This quartet is one of his finest works, exhibiting both a creative freshness and an imaginative if somewhat unusual structural plan, features that attest to Schulhoff's inventive skills in the string quartet genre. This is one of the few early twentieth century works that can appeal to those with either conservative or adventurous tastes.

In 1915, Bartók wrote the Romanian Folk Dances. Originally written for piano, they were transcribed for small orchestra two years later. These folk dances do not actually originate from the country of Romania as we recognize it today. Rather, the title Romanian Folk Dances of Hungary, by which the work is known in Bartók's country, more aptly describes their origins. Characteristic of the excellent Hungarian musician and composer, these folk dances are indeed a truly creative refashioning of Transylvanian peasant dances that could have been composed only by one who knew them thoroughly and personally. The Romanian Folk Dances show Bartók as a master of assimilation and synthesis of quite diverse forms of expression.

Dvořák composed the Quartet in 1893 during a summer vacation from his teaching post in New York. He spent his vacation in the town of Spillville, Iowa, which was home to a Czech immigrant community. He composed the quartet shortly after the New World Symphony, completing the manuscript in only three days. 'As for my new Symphony, the F major String Quartet and the Quintet (composed here in Spillville) – I should never have written these works 'just so' if I hadn't seen America,' wrote Dvořák in a letter in 1893.