We are delighted to open our season in customary style with the Sacconi Quartet who bring us two works by composers central to the quartet genre, preceded by Heartfelt, a work in two movements by Roxanna Panufnik, commissioned by the Sacconis in 2019. Panufnik, a composer now familiar to Wallingford audiences, begins with a movement using four dance melodies from Uzbekistan and concludes with Lament For A Bulgarian Dancing Bear. This is intriguingly based on the recorded heartbeat of Albie, a European brown bear as he underwent surgery at Bristol Zoo!

Shostakovich wrote his C minor Quartet in just three days in the Summer of 1960. The published score is dedicated "to the victims of fascism and war" but the composer’s son stated that, considering suicide at the time, Shostakovich dedicated it to himself as his epitaph. This dramatic and compelling work starts with the composer’s personal four note motif and quotes from a number of his works, as well as Soviet and Jewish songs.

Beethoven’s mighty A minor Quartet Op. 132 is the third of his five ‘late’ quartets, the profound summation of a lifetime of spiritual and musical exploration. At its heart is an extraordinary, hymn-like movement written as a thanksgiving for his recovery from serious illness.