Rainer Schmidt Violin
Veronika Hagen Viola
Clemens Hagen Violoncello
Johann Sebastian Bach The Art of the Fugue BWV 1080 (selection)
Franz Schubert String Quartet no. 14 in D minor D 810 "Death and the Maiden" Foreign in one's own country. Lost to the homeland. Searching for the familiar in the radically changed, for inner peace in the midst of thunderous hostility. No one embodies this like Dmitri Shostakovich. Not only once did he fall under the spell of the Soviet regime, to which he was only outwardly loyal. Inwardly, he went into emigration and encoded his resistance in numerous compositions. The Eighth String Quartet in particular tells of his abhorrence of Soviet power. With quotations from his most regime-critical compositions, he populated this personal work, which the Hagen Quartet places at the centre of an intense concert. The expressivity and uncompromisingness with which the renowned ensemble approaches its interpretations not only benefit Shostakovich. Schubert's string quartet "Death and the Maiden" is also in exactly the right hands with the Hagens: It touches on Schubert's most crisis-ridden times, when illness and deep self-doubt made the rocky road to longed-for success almost impassable. Source of text and further information about this event: https://www.alteoper.de/de/programm/veranstaltung.php?id=518140145
