Performers
Programme
Today, only Robert Schumann's Third Symphony can lay claim to the epithet “Rhenish”, but it would be just as justified for Johannes Brahms' Sextet in B flat major. During a stay in Bonn in the summer of 1860, he completed the work and confessed that his life at the time was “more blissful” than ever. Despite careful work on nuances, the sextet reflects this elation in its songfulness and joie de vivre and, together with the “German Requiem”, became the first great success in Johannes Brahms' career as a composer.
It was Johannes Brahms who promoted the Bohemian composer Antonín Dvořak in many ways, especially by recommending him to his publisher Simrock. Antonín Dvořak's “Slavonic Dances”, published by Simrock, made him famous overnight. The fact that he composed his only string sextet in the same year as his Slavonic Dances can be heard in the work. Composed in 1878, it opens the “Bohemian period” in the composer's chamber music - in an equally rousing and highly romantic manner.
With these two jewels of the sextet literature, the London-based Marmen Quartet returns to the chamber concerts of the Museums-Gesellschaft after its successful debut in 2022, expanded to a string sextet by two proven chamber musicians who have long been closely associated with the Marmen Quartet.
(Frankfurter Museums-Gesellschaft e.V.)