57. Finale

57. Finale
Back in 2019 before the two lost years, the Festival gave the Irish premiere of Swedish composer Andrea Tarrodi’s ‘Light Scattering’, so it is encouraging to find another major Quartet picking up her work. The quartet’s title is a perfect description for the music tells how light dances on the surface of the water and how it bounces from mirrors and shines through windows and then right at the end calls up the sea and the sound of gulls crying. Louise Farrenc must have been an extraordinary woman, virtuoso pianist, composer and teacher. She was the only female professor at the Paris Conservatoire in the entire 19th century, teaching there for 30 years and fighting for and eventually receiving equal pay with her male colleagues. Equally impressive was her ability not only to compose both chamber works and symphonies, but to get them performed in an opera-mad city. Her joyful Sextet for piano and winds opens with a riotously inventive first movement followed by an idyllic and charming Andante with echoes of Mozart before concluding with a agitated but playful finale. Schumann described Mendelssohn as ‘the Mozart of the 19th century, the most illuminating of composers, who sees more clearly than others through the contradictions of our time and is the first to reconcile them.’ His D major Cello Sonata is a potent and passionate work whose first movement is dominated by the cello’s exultant theme. This tremendous opening is followed by a light-footed Intermezzo, a noble Adagio and a cheerfully wild finale. Tchaikovsky was not a natural chamber music composer indeed he claimed he felt he was writing for a string orchestra and then arranging it for sextet. Indeed listening to this powerful music you can feel the writing straining at the limitations of the form, which making for exciting listening. Of course this being Tchaikovsky the slow movement is unbearably moving; over a raindrop backing of pizzicati the first violin steals in with one of his heart-melting themes that he unashamedly milks for every teardrop. Although the next two movements generate huge energy and a triumphant blaze of sound, you will leave with this song in your heart.