Andermatt Music: Borromeo Festival Gala

"The combination of having an enormous ego in order to step onto a stage at all, and letting go of this ego at the moment of the performance so that you can do justice to the music - that is a very important aspect for me, something I have been working on for many, many years." With this answer, which Andreas Haefliger gave to the question of what is probably the greatest challenge for a pianist, it becomes clear: on the concert platform, the grand piano is always associated with a special presence. In Andermatt, the Borromeo Music Festival Players and Haefliger present different variations of this presence - and also the absence - of the piano sound in combination with string instruments.The Spanish composer Joaquín Turina Pérez assigned a special role to the keyboard instrument when he wrote his Piano Quartet in A minor at the beginning of the 1930s. Turina Pérez almost embarked on a career as a pianist himself, but then switched to the path of composing - and created a secret solo part for the instrument he loved so much in the last movement of his quartet. Othmar Schoeck's first string quartet from 1913 manages without any keyboard playing at all. The Swiss composer artfully transfers his talent for song composition to the clear, catchy themes of his instrumental music. The alpine buoyancy of Schoeck's quartet forms a charming contrast to Turina Pérez's Spanish pathos.Johannes Brahms also had an all-string ensemble in mind when he drafted a quintet for two violins, a viola and two cellos in August 1862. However, the sound turned out to be partly "impotently thin" and partly "too thick". Brahms decided to make a U-turn towards keyboard instruments: it was now to be a duo for two pianos. Together with his close confidante Clara Schumann, he performed the work, only to revise it fundamentally on the advice of his duo partner: Only through the combination of string quartet and piano - first heard in 1865 in the Basel apartment of the Riggenbach-Stehlin couple - did Brahms' composition unfold its balanced, perfect sound, which can now also be experienced in Andermatt.Program:Othmar Schoeck (1886-1957):String Quartet No. 1 in D major op. 23Joaquín Turina Pérez (1882-1949):Piano Quartet in A minor op. 67Johannes Brahms (1833-1897):Piano Quintet in F minor op. 34Note: This text was translated by machine translation software and not by a human translator. It may contain translation errors.