For this programme, the Merel Quartet is joined by their friend, the violist Silvia Simionescu. Violist of the Gringolts Quartet and professor at the Basel University of Music FHNW, she was already a kindred-spirited partner to the ensemble in MCS 2025 and at the Zwischentöne Chamber Music Festival Engelberg.
Beethoven’s Quintet in C major op. 29 is a lesser-known work and seldom performed. Even extensive reference works with encyclopaedic ambitions manage without a mention and regular concert-goers will encounter it only rarely, perhaps never. Ludwig van Beethoven’s only original string quintet, in C major op. 29, written in 1800/01 on commission from Count Moritz von Fries drew him into a tiresome and ugly legal dispute when a pirated edition circulated in Vienna, briefly turning it into a scandal piece. Yet immediately after Beethoven’s death, the Berliner Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung praised the quintet as “the most spirited and artistically mature work of our great master, and at the same time one of his simplest and therefore already universally beloved.”
Dvořák was an early riser. At first light he would head out into nature, walking through the woods or along the riverbank, listening with fresh delight each day to the calls and songs of the birds, before returning home in the best of spirits to sit down to work. At seven o’clock, however, he went to Mass at St. Wenceslaus Church, took his seat at the organ in the gallery, improvised the chorale preludes and accompanied the congregation’s singing. So passed the days of summer 1893: walks, carriage rides, visits, music-making at home and, in between, the leisurely pursuit of composing, which came easily to him during this period, as if it were the simplest thing in the world. Those holiday months remained in Antonín Dvořák’s memory as the happiest time of his ambivalent, arduous and distinguished stay in America. In the familiar surroundings of the town, steeped in folk music, he wrote the String Quintet in E-flat major op. 97 in just one month, immediately after completing his famous “American” String Quartet.
