Programme

Schubert
Fantasie in F minor for piano four hands, D. 940

Reich
Different Trains for string quartet (1988)
Ligeti Quartet

This late-night concert brings together two works written 160 years apart, tracing very different kinds of journeys. From an inward voyage in Schubert to a starkly documented passage through twentieth-century history in Reich.

Franz Schubert’s Fantasie in F minor for piano four hands, D. 940 is among his most searching and emotionally charged works. Beneath its flowing surface lies an extraordinary sense of intimacy and vulnerability, as themes recur and transform in music that feels at once tender, restless and profoundly human.

Steve Reich’s Different Trains (1988) shifts the programme into the soundworld of the late twentieth century. Written for string quartet and recorded speech, the piece reflects Reich’s childhood journeys across America during the Second World War, set against the vastly different train journeys of European Jews at the same time. Urgent, rhythmic and deeply moving, Different Trains has become one of the defining works of late twentieth-century chamber music, and one whose impact is felt with particular force in live performance.