In the organizer's words:

Chamber music: Elphier Quartet with Shostakovich and Brahms

Chamber music with works by Brahms, Glinka, Kim and Shostakovich: the Elphier Quartet, together with double bassist Benedikt Kany and pianist Haiou Zhang, invites you to the Elbphilharmonie's Small Hall on June 10.

Shostakovich & Kim: Images of war

Benedikt Kany, double bass player of the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, accompanies the Elphier Quartet at the concert in the Small Hall.

Shostakovich's Eighth String Quartet in C minor is one of the composer's most personal works. There are allusions to Wagner's "Götterdämmerung" and Tchaikovsky's confessional symphony "Pathétique". But Shostakovich also immortalized himself, with themes from earlier works as well as the musical code D-Es-C-H. The piece was composed in 1960 during a visit to Dresden, which was destroyed in 1945. The horrors of the destruction shocked Shostakovich so much that he dedicated the quartet to the victims of war and fascism.

"Postcard from the Camp - An Elegy for Wartime Comfort Women" from 2003 also commemorates the victims of war. Comfort women is a euphemism for women and girls who were forcibly prostituted in Japanese soldiers' brothels during the Second World War. It was not until the 1990s that the Japanese government issued official apologies and compensation to the survivors of this physical and psychological violence. The string quartet by composer and director Cecilia Heejeong Kim is a lament in memory of these victims.

Johannes Brahms: playing with forms

Johannes Brahms was apparently so dissatisfied with the first drafts of his Piano Quintet in F minor from 1862 that he destroyed it along with the string quintet on which it was based. Repeated criticism from Joseph Joachim and Clara Schumann led to a long and particularly tortuous compositional process. After the intermediate stage of a new version as a sonata for two pianos, the final version as a piano quintet did not appear until 1865/66.

Long since accepted today as one of Brahms' most beautiful works, it still provoked some divided opinions among the public when it first appeared. Clara Schumann, after all, felt it was a work with themes so "wonderfully grand" that they should be "scattered over the whole orchestra with a cornucopia".

Glinka's piano sextet: emotion and brilliance

The young Mikhail Glinka, one of the "fathers of Russian music" in the 19th century, grew up in an environment of intensively cultivated domestic music. Following his musical interests, he began studying in St. Petersburg. However, he was repeatedly drawn far away. From 1830, he spent three years in Italy to study opera and bel canto, which was to have a strong influence on his compositions. In Milan, the composer became friends with Bellini, whose premiere of "Sonnambula" he attended.

Impressed by the work, Glinka wrote a version for chamber music in 1832, the 'Divertimento brilliante sopra alcuni motivi della "Sonnambula"' for piano sextet. He wanted to achieve emotion and brilliance - and thrill the audience with the technically demanding variations of the well-known arias. Glinka placed the vocal part in the hands of one of his pupils, a young pianist (to whom he also dedicated the work), while the orchestral and choral interjections are in the strings.