A chamber music summit, a splendid troika of Russian sound: Julian Rachlin, internationally renowned violinist and the new Artistic Director of HERBSTGOLD, invites two other leading figures of the international music scene, Mischa Maisky and Alexei Volodin, to Eisenstadt to perform two memorials to the dead, in which great music arose out of grief and misery. Tchaikovsky, for example, composed his monumental A minor trio following the sudden death of his teacher and patron Anton Rubinstein. In the pezzo elegiaco first movement, the beautiful and the sad undergo constant metamorphoses and yet coincide; then a broadly executed chain of variations heads toward the final triumph, which collapses into an oppressive funeral march built on the elegiac opening theme - a symbol of Rubinstein's early death at the height of his fame. Some 60 years later in 1944, Shostakovich also employs a funeral march, which here emerges from a passacaglia, to close. The work is a heart-breaking lamentation on the death of Shostakovich's close friend, the polymath Ivan Sollertinski, and on the misery and deprivation of the war years.

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Note: This concert was originally scheduled for Friday, 17 September 2021.