No Wallingford concert series would be complete without the Sacconi Quartet, this year appearing both with two extra players to play sextets by Brahms and Strauss, and in their regular quartet configuration to play Haydn. 

Richard Strauss wrote his final opera Capriccio in the dark years of the Nazi period. As an act of escapism, he set the opera in Eighteenth Century Paris, its plot revolving around the question ‘which art is greater – poetry or music?’ The Sextet opens the opera as its overture, perhaps settling the question even before the curtain is raised!

In advertising his Op. 33 quartets, Haydn declared them to “be written in a new and special manner”. The third and most popular work in the group carries the nickname The Bird on account of its avian violin writing.

Last year we included the first of Brahms’s two string sextets and we are delighted to be able to include the second of these wonderful works in this year’s programme: full of delicate but heartfelt emotion, its musical themes are based on letters from the name Agathe von Siebold to whom Brahms had been briefly engaged.