Benjamin Grosvenor

Four internationally acclaimed young musicians, all award-winning international soloists in their own right, join forces in lavishly Romantic chamber music. Violinist Hyeyoon Park, viola player Timothy Ridout, cellist Kian Soltani and pianist Benjamin Grosvenor have formed an ongoing piano quartet. Tonight they take the stage to perform two rollercoaster masterworks by Richard Strauss and Johannes Brahms. Strauss’ Piano Quartet is a stormy, adventurous piece showing the composer full of youthful passion and bravado. You can hear his roots in the influence of Brahms and Beethoven, but also the soaring melodies and rich textures that later came to characterise his orchestral tone-poems. The Brahms C minor Piano Quartet is the most dramatic of the composer’s three. After first drafting it in the heat of his youthful unrequited passion for Clara Schumann, when he related it to the story of Goethe’s Werther, Brahms revised it much later. The result is music of rugged, uncompromising magnificence. ‘That sense of joy and fun was all-pervading, yet detail was not forgotten, with some beautiful pianissimo string playing, and pinpoint accurate, rapid passagework from Grosvenor’ Bachtrack ‘A “supergroup” of brilliant young soloists’ The Arts Desk