New season of top-flight chamber music concerts launches in Lewes

Launching the season is the multi award-winning Piatti Quartet. They will be playing Elgar’s solitary string quartet and Beethoven’s Opus 59 No 1 (Rasoumovsky). Also in the programme is Fuzon by Lewes-based composer John Hawkins.

John, who is also spokesman for the Society, said: “The Piatti Quartet are justly renowned for their acute sensitivity and their lyrical warmth. Since their prizewinning performances at the 2015 Wigmore Hall String Quartet Competition they have performed all over the world and made international broadcasts from many countries. The quartet takes its name from the great 19th-century cellist Alfredo Piatti, who was a leading professor and exponent of chamber music at the Royal Academy of Music.

“Elgar wrote his Quartet in 1918. Arthur Troyte Griffith, subject of one of the famous cameo portraits in the Enigma Variations, said of the slow movement ‘Surely that is as fine as a movement by Beethoven.’ Elgar is said to have agreed with him! In Beethoven’s own time one player said to him of one of the Rasoumovsy quartet ‘Surely you do not consider this music?’ to which Beethoven responded, ‘Not for you, but for a later age.’ A more recent performer describes the quartet as a sublime musical conversation.

“Later in the season concerts will be given by Zoltán Fejérvári (piano), the Brompton String Quartet and the Armida Quartet. The final concert, on March 24, welcomes back the Arcadia Quartet for their third visit to Lewes together with Katja Apekisheva (piano). As always there is a feast of music by a full range of popular and less-well known music by composers from Bach to Szymanowski and includes quartets by Sussex-based composers Peter Copley and John Hawkins.

The venue is the Cliffe Building, East Sussex College, Mountfield Road, Lewes BN7 2XH. There is plenty of free parking. Time 7.30pm. Tickets: £20 (under 26s are free on the door) from https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/nyslewes. See also https://www.nyslewes.org.uk/