Alke Quartet

Henry Chandler returns to the Barnes Music Festival with the Quartet he has recently joined performing a contrasting programme of light-hearted Haydn and passionate psychological Janacek which they will have played the evening before at the Wigmore Hall.

Haydn, ‘the father of the string quartet’, boasted that he had developed “a new and entirely special kind” of string quartet when he composed Op33, No2, ‘The Joke’ which features music that playfully defies the expectation of its audiences.

Janecek’s first string quartet, ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’, was inspired by Tolstoy’s novella, of the same name, and was composed whilst “imagining a poor woman, tormented and run down, just like the one the Russian writer Tolstoy describes".

Content (individual pieces)

Haydn – String Quartet in Eb major Op33 No2

Janacek – String Quartet No.1