Australian String Quartet: Speechless

After Mozart’s death, Peter Lichtenthal distilled his idol’s Requiem into a wordless, pristine string quartet masterwork, transforming it from profoundly religious into a beautiful, abstract work of art.

Berg’s Lyric Suite is a similar song without words; there are quotes from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde and Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony, and the last movement is a secret wordless setting of a poem by Baudelaire. It’s a work borne of a doomed love affair, set against the backdrop of a fin de siecle Vienna.

At the heart of any Schubert work is song, and it is with his frantically scurrying and carefree singing Quartettsatz that we open this program; an unfinished work that somehow feels as if nothing more could be said.

The Australian String Quartet members are Kristian Winther, violin, Ioana Tache, violin, Stephen King, viola, Sharon Draper, cello