April Chamber Players

The musicians of the VSO are thrilled to be back to playing the series they curate, the VSO Chamber Players! It’s a joy to share this music in the intimate and acoustically-brilliant Pyatt Hall for four concert programs, each with an evening and matinee option.

The VSO Chamber players is pleased to present a collection of four pieces by three of the great composers of the twentieth century. Dmitri Shostakovich’s Five Pieces for Two Violins and Piano is a surprisingly charming collection of simple popular music – arrangements of ballet suites, an animated cartoon, and the film “The Gadfly”. Zoltán Kodály’s String Quartet No. 2, a lush work drawing inspiration from both Hungarian folk songs and dance rhythms, and French impressionism, is considered one of the most important works of early modern Hungarian chamber music. Our third offering is a wonderful string sextet written by Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu. The work was composed in under a week, and yet won first prize in composition competition. The composer refused to collect his reward for several weeks, believing his friends were merely playing a trick on him by insisting he had won. The final work on the programme brings all eights VSO musicians together for Shostakovich’s Two Pieces for String Octet. Shostakovich completed the work at only nineteen years old, and proclaimed the scherzo movement to be “the very best thing I have written” (Laurel Faye, “Shostakovich, A Life”). Audiences will no doubt be transported by this exquisite collection of some of the most beautiful and varied chamber music of the twentieth century.