Each composition in Nostalgia, the Sheffield Chamber Player’s final concert of the season, looks to the past for inspiration, and says a little prayer for the sometimes terrifying, sometimes beautiful place where we find ourselves now.
The first quartet is by Boris Lyatoshynsky (1895-1968), a Ukrainian composer who was exiled and denounced in the Stalin era as "too formalist”. The third is by a young Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) thunderstruck by hearing Beethoven’s new and thrilling late quartets for the first time. Lyatoshynsky intertwines Ukrainian folk songs with modernist dissonance and a longing look back to the lush romantic flowering that musicians like Mendelssohn were exploring a century before. For both composers, there is suffering, yearning, and loss -- but also a sense of inner freedom and hope in the music-making itself.
The heart of the concert is a set from the ongoing project “This is It”, by the brilliant young composer Reena Esmail (b.1983).
Esmail’s exquisite quartet weaves together an east/west divan of myriad modalities, all reaching together for a place of peace -- fleeting, fragile moments that linger in the mind as a meditation to return to again and again, long after the music has drifted into the air.
Sheffield Chamber Players is a string quartet with musicians Sasha Callahan and Megumi Stohs Lewis on violin, Leo Eguchi on cello, Alexander Vavilov on viola, with mezzo soprano Christina English as Executive Director.
The musicians play splendidly together, meeting each other's eyes and sensitive even to the slightest quivers of the bows.
Sheffield commissioned and performed one of a "set of miniatures" from This is It, an ongoing project by Reena Esmail.
