2023-07-22 09:00:07
The Mona quartet, in February 2022. ZOé DUCOURNAU
The 38th edition of the Festival Radio France Montpellier Occitanie, which is held until July 28, is showing a welcome renewal this year with some 90 events in around forty places, i.e. more than 70,000 tickets available, not counting the free events in public squares in Montpellier. The part reserved for young artists is played at midday. Thursday July 20, in the small Pasteur hall of the Corum, the four young women of the Mona Quartet. Three nationalities, four bows: on the first violin, the Latvian Elina Buksha, on the second, the French Charlotte Chahuneau, the Americans Arianna Smith and Annie Jacobs-Perkins sharing the viola and the cello. The program resembles them, which combines the great repertoire with the rediscovery of unknown composers as well as contemporary creation.
Read also: Article reserved for our subscribers The 80 best festivals of summer 2023: the “World” selection
The concert started with the quartet movement by Eric Montalbetti (born in 1968), first movement of a score entitled Harmonious dissonances (2019). A dense, playful and coruscant music, whose disruptive game modes will strive to find common ground. With its descending octave leap, era minor, the String Quartet No. 15 Mozart’s KV 421 immediately offers a dark tonality. The Mona approach it with an expressiveness, clarity and mastery of phrasing that serve the polyphonic homogeneity. The ternary flexibility of a « Andante » modulated with nostalgia, a « Menuetto » certainly lacking a bit of vehemence (although illuminated by the very Viennese contrasting solo of the first violin accompanied in pizzicatos) and the pre-Schubertian « Cheerful but not too much »with its Sicilian rhythm and its variations, are delivered with sensitivity and elegance.
The composer to be rediscovered is called Johanna Müller-Hermann (1868-1941). A pupil of Zemlinsky, influenced by Mahler and Max Reger, the Austrian was one of the musical figures of the end of the 20th century, but her name will be all the more easily erased “the contribution of women to the creative life of Vienna at this time was largely forgotten as a result of Nazi ideology, as well as the general destruction of World War II”, explains British musicologist Carola Darwin. The Mona perform his unique String Quartet, op. 6, whose first movement, sensual, fluid and undulating, mixes Germanic expressionism with very Faurean harmonic turns. After a leaping and faunal « Allegro lively »with assertive breaks in tone, the slow movement « Adagio with expression », with an at first contained lyricism, will extrovert to the poignant double strings of the first violin. A light and dancing finale, of great freedom of inspiration, will receive the acclamations of the public.
You have 48.6% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.
#Festival #Radio #France #Occitanie #Montpellier #magic #pianist #Piotr #Anderszewski