Another magical evening on Sunday 27 November at the Kempe Studio at The Muses: transported back to the Vienna of the early 19th Century by Cordula Kempe, we were immersed in the life and times of Franz Schubert.

The scene of Europe’s ‘Holy City of Music’ was set by Schubert’s rarely performed German Dances and Minuets for strings, interspersed with some for piano - all of them little vignettes which illustrated the biographical sketches of the much-loved and yet so little-known composer and his circle of friends. The skilfully blended music – some of which might be called pop music today - reflected their spirit of youth and jovial mirth implied by the title, yet not all of it resembled what is commonly called ‘Biedermeier Idyll’. The sunny landscape was often overcast by flitting shadows of Hamlet’s melancholy clouds – ‘a weasel? a camel? a whale?’ - as in the poignant a minor Minuet of the String Quartet D 804, an excerpt of the
f minor Fantasy for piano duet, or the Trio of muted violin with pizzicato accompaniment that underscored the fatal illness the 25 year old composer contracted - a powerful emotional impact.

Forbes Masson brought to the part of Schubert a wonderful range of inspirational insight and sense of humour, whilst the lovely husband and wife team of Julian Glover and Isla Blair guided us through Schubert's troubled life, interweaving its narrative with some beautiful renderings of poetry by Shelley, Schiller, Shakespeare, Auden and Schubert himself.

The Bergonzi Quartet, led by Cordula Kempe, with Barbara O’Reilly on 2nd violin – who also doubled as Schubert’s piano pupil Countess Esterhazy – and with Robin Del Mar, viola, and Peter Wilson, cello were, as we all, fortunate and privileged to have the services of pianist Jakob Fichert and the magnificent Double Bass player from Dresden, Werner Zeibig, in an exuberant performance of the Trout Quintet that concluded the programme.

The musicians’ sensitive playing, in its diversity of dynamics and colours, enabled us to feel what lies beneath the surface of deceptively light-hearted music, the interrelation of light and shade in constantly shifting mood, of melodies switching from major into minor key and back within one fleeting bar, and the use of jolly dance rhythms that barely conceal their kinship to the dance of death - Schubert’s experience of life as expressed in one of his letters:

“I wanted to sing of love, but it turned into pain.
I wanted to sing of pain, and it turned into love.”

The evening was a huge success and enjoyed by a more than usually full house. The next programme, in the first New year’s offering, will bring music for string sextet by Bach, Brahms, Dvořák and Richard Strauss, under the title of a quote by Congreve:

‘Music alone with sudden charms can bind
The wand’ring sense, and calm the troubled mind.’