19. Main Evening Concert

19. Main Evening Concert
Thierry Escaich is a highly distinguished French composer and organist, recently appointed as titular organist for the newly rebuilt Notre Dame Cathedral. His Scènes de bal explores the memory of five short dances that bring an old, deserted dance hall back to life. Fauré’s Quartet was his last work, he waited until he was 78 and almost completely deaf before he dared to compose a genre made unapproachable by those who lived in the shadow of Beethoven. It is an introverted and spiritual work with an incandescent slow movement of heart-breaking beauty. Like late Schubert, you feel the composer cannot bear to part with his last and most moving creation. It is incredibly difficult to play and Tchalik Quartet is the first Quartet who have dared bring it to the Festival stage. After the interval, Barry Douglas brings us another work, Liszt’s Sonata in B minor, notorious for its difficulty. Liszt was one of the great originals of the nineteenth century, a larger than life figure of High Romantic paradox, a man bound up with God and Mephistopheles, the diabolic and the Catholic, Faust and the Divine Comedy. The Sonata itself is his most consummate work for his own instrument - a unique study in thematic transformation, an essay of complex structural organisation, of wondrous tonal insights and enigmatic harmonic manifestations and of molten no less than fragile keyboard beauty.