Evgeni Koroliov, Keller Quartet & Concerto Budapest

Evgeni Koroliov, Keller Quartet and Concerto Budapest back in concert together: a really serious offer for the audience. As is only right and fitting with a programme whose opening number features the word ‘Serioso’ in its title, and rightly so since the third movement with Scherzo form and function of Beethoven’s String Quartet in F minor bears the author’s note: Allegro assai vivace ma serioso. Following the composition by Gustav Mahler performed in string chamber orchestra arrangement, we can spend time in the company of masters and guaranteed masterpieces: Bach’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor and perhaps the best-known Schubert chamber work. The Trout Quintet is performed by the dazzling Russian guest artist and Keller Quartet, who regularly play with him in a most congenial atmosphere. The song title Trout dates from early 1817, and its theme serves as much more than a setting of Schubert’s poem to music: two years later, wealthy provincial patron and amateur cellist Sylvester Paumgartner commissioned Schubert to recycle the melody in chamber music format. This is how the Trout Quintet came about, with the melody in the fourth movement familiar to all.