Ashburton Chamber Music Festival - concert 2

The festival's second concert opens with Shostakovich's sixth quartet written while he was on honeymoon: a surprisingly playful, even sweet, work from a composer more often associated with biting irony or painfully dark music. Cassado's solo suite for cello comes next and is the Spanish composer's interpretation of how Bach would have written for the cello if he had been born 1,500 miles to the South. Dvorák's 'American' quartet closes the concert. Written during a sojourn in Iowa, USA, the piece is both an homage to American sound and energy even as it is unmistakably Eastern European and possibly the finest quartet by the Czech master.