The Gealán Quartet returns for their second tour for the National String Quartet Foundation with a fascinating programme featuring a new quartet by Derry composer Michael Doherty. Michael has a busy career as composer and orchestrator for films and TV series, as well as for the concert hall. Schumann wrote his gorgeous A minor quartet just seventeen years after Beethoven’s last quartets and the spirit of the master is clearly still present, but there is also some of the lightness of touch of the quartet’s dedicatee Mendelssohn as well as glimpses of the future richness and density of Brahms’ great chamber works. Shostakovich wrote his heart-rending eighth quartet in Dresden in 1960. Its official dedication to ‘the victims of fascism and war’ was imposed by the Soviet authorities and disguised a wider dedication to victims of all totalitarianism, Shostakovich himself among them. See www.nsqf.ie
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