Echoes of Vienna

Vienna was in the grip of serious political unrest that forced many of its artists into exile when Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957) composed his Second String Quartet in 1933, first performed the following year in the Austrian capital. In it he celebrated, before it faded away, the vitality of a musical school of which Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) had been one of the founders more than a century and a half earlier, and which Anton Webern (1883-1945) had helped to usher into modernity. It is this lineage that the musicians of the Quatuor Hermès (The Hermès String Quartet) highlight through a twilight-tinged programme in which each work bears witness to a fascinating narrative power and could be understood as an expression of a farewell.