Katalin Kokas, Maxim Rysanov, Dóra Kokas and Lily Maisky Presented by Liszt Academy

Tchaikovsky’s trio scored for violin, cello and piano fills the first half of this concert by the Kokas sisters and their two famous foreign partners. The piece has just two movements but lasts around forty-five minutes. The first movement concludes with an elegiac funeral march (opus 50 dedicated to the memory of composer Nikolai Rubinstein); the second movement is an unusual set of variations beginning in the major key but ending up in the minor which recalls one of the opening movement’s melodies and yet chiming with the funeral march. This is followed after the interlude by Schumann’s four-movement Fairy Tale Pictures (for viola and piano). Unfortunately, the composer never revealed which tales he was thinking about while he was composing the piece. Finally, it is the turn of the Brahms Piano Quartet in C minor (four movements). It was once known as the Werther Quartet, after Goethe’s famous work, because of its melancholic tone. Some musicologists have speculated that Brahms wove the Clara motif – named after Schumann’s widow – into it, spelling out her name in keys, with certain modifications: ‘C-B-A-G-sharp-A’. Since this motif also regularly appears in other Brahms compositions, it is possible that the imaginative musicologists have got it right this time.