At the beginning of 2016 the “3+1” string quartet marked its fifth birthday with a concert. At the core of the quartet are the LNSO’s principal viola Arigo Štrāls and principal cello Diana Ozoliņa – long-standing chamber music partners ever since the earliest days of the “Riga Chamber Musicians” orchestra at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. In the “3+1” quartet the experience of these two masters is joined by what the younger-generation LNSO violinists Beāte Račko and Liene Neija-Kalniņa bring to it.
The quartet habitually invites a pianist as well. In earlier concerts of the “LNSO Chamber Music” series the LNSO foursome was joined by Elīna Bērtiņa, Sandra Jalaņecka and Edgars Tomševics. This time the guest will be a professor at the Latvian Academy of Music, a musician of great erudition, wide knowledge and considerable talent, Sergejs Osokins, whom we also know as the father of the remarkable younger-generation pianists Andrejs and Georgijs, a searcher of horizons and a teacher of piano.
Together with Sergejs Osokins, “3+1” will perform a brilliant masterpiece by a little-known Polish pianist and composer. The composer in question is Juliusz Zarębski (1854–1885) – an exceptionally gifted young man who studied in Vienna and St Petersburg, a protégé of Franz Liszt and an outstanding piano virtuoso whose life was cut short in his early years by tuberculosis; even so, Zarębski had time to appear in Europe’s major cities as a sought-after pianist rewarded with ovations. In his final years he turned to teaching. The Quintet included in this programme was composed in the last year of Zarębski’s life and is regarded as his most significant work.
The Quintet is thrilling to listen to: after an impressive and ever-changing first movement comes a singing adagio wrapped in a beautiful halo of rippling sound; the scherzo is a partly wild, partly dance-like gallop to nowhere; and in the finale the swift changes of mood reach an ardent culmination, with echoes of what was heard in the earlier movements.
This time the “3+1” quartet’s guests will also include two LNSO musicians.
The violist Tatjana Ļebedeva will join them for Johannes Brahms’s Second String Quintet Op. 111, and this chamber work too is a genuine masterpiece: it is dominated by a joie de vivre full of self-possession, giving way in the second movement to wondrously beautiful contemplation and in the third to a gently resigned quasi waltz.
The LNSO’s principal cello Ieva Upatniece, in turn, will take part in the performance of the String Quintet by Carl Vine – perhaps Australia’s most popular composer of contemporary classical music.
String Quartet “3+1”:
Beāte RAČKO, 1st violin
Liene NEIJA-KALNIŅA, 2nd violin
Arigo ŠTRĀLS, viola
Diana OZOLIŅA, cello
Tatjana ĻEBEDEVA, viola
Ieva UPATNIECE, cello
Sergejs OSOKINS, piano