The outstanding Meliora Quartet join us for this concert at Triskel as part of their NSQF Young Artists summer tour. They also take part in the Young Musicians Programme at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival in June/July and will be the NSQF Fellowship Quartet at the Concorda Chamber Music Course in July/August, working with the course participants.

Pulitzer prize winning composer Caroline Shaw took Beethoven’s quartet Op.18 No.6, as the blueprint of her 2016 quartet of that name and its transformation is both fascinating and entertaining.

Webern’s ‘Langsamer Satz’ (slow piece) is a beautiful and passionate love song to his future wife, written in the rich late Romantic soundworld of his teacher Schoenberg’s Verklarte Nacht.

The magnificent, epic, opening movement of Beethoven’s B flat major quartet Op.130 is followed by four beautifully crafted and highly contrasted inner movements, culminating in the famous Cavatina of which Beethoven wrote that he had composed it truly in the tears of melancholy. It leads into the quartet’s concluding finale, a good-natured antidote which Beethoven wrote, at his publisher’s request, as an alternative to the quartet’s original last movement, the massive Grosse Fuge.

The Meliora Quartet

Cillian Ó Cathasaigh, violin
Seán Hurley, violin
Kseniia Yershova, viola
Alina Obreja, cello

The Programme

Caroline Shaw – Blueprint [2016]
Webern – Langsamer Satz [1905]
Ludwig van Beethoven – String Quartet in B flat major Op.130 [1826]