56. Young Musicians Platform

56. Young Musicians Platform
A showcase of 2025 Masterclass Programme Quartets
This year’s masterclass series featured four young string quartets and a single Baroque ensemble. Two other groups also had masterclasses. They were each tutored by Festival performers and two specialist tutors and five of them each offer a work for our Young Musicians Platform. Passeri Ensemble is a Baroque group where the works are short, thus the two pieces. Vivaldi’s ‘La Follia’ is a popular showcase building to a tremendous climax. Sonic Quartet is bravely taking on Garth Knox ‘Satellites’, one of Kronos Quartet’s ‘Fifty for the Future’. It chimes with the recent Booker Prize winner, a novel about the six astronauts in a space station circling Earth multiple times each day. The second movement of ‘Satellites’ is called ‘Spectral Sunrise’ inspired by hearing an astronaut talking about seeing sixteen sunrises in a day. Fanny Mendelssohn was Felix Mendelssohn’s sister, who was as good a musician as her composer brother, who considered it not proper for her to perform in public. She got around this by marrying a rich husband and putting on private concerts in their Berlin house, where she could perform her own works. Janáček’s ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ is the first of his two quartets that he wrote in his seventies inspired by his passion for a married woman half his age. The quartet tells the story of Tolstoy’s novella of the same name, a story of jealousy and murder built around a performance of the Beethoven Kreutzer Sonata. Smetana’s ‘From My Life’ Quartet is a vividly dramatic account of the blows an adverse Fate had inflicted upon him – his deafness and the death of his wife and children.