Peasmarsh Chamber Music Festival: Concert 4 - Saturday morning concert

The Peasmarsh Chamber Music Festival is thrilled to announce its programme and artists for this year’s festival at the end of June, bringing world-class musicians to this small but beautiful corner of the East Sussex countryside. With ten concerts over four days, the festival allows audiences to enjoy international chamber music on their doorstep and has become a significant event in the regional cultural calendar.

Despite the first signs of mental turmoil on the horizon, Schumann’s gorgeous miniatures are full of beauty as he revisits the fantasy world of his earlier piano music. A selection of Kurtág’s exquisite Signs, Games and Messages, in which the composer looks for the purest musical expression through the most minimal means, follows Bach’s 2-part canons; published posthumously in 1751 for unspecified instrumentation, the Art of Fugue explores the contrapuntal possibilities contained in a single musical idea. Based on a single theme given to him by King Frederick the Great, Bach’s fugue in six voices is considered the high point of his remarkable collection of canons and fugues for solo keyboard, and is performed here by a string sextet. Brahms’ first string quartet, preceded by 20 sketches of quartets that did not make it to publication, is the perfect example of the composer’s technique of developing variation, with an entire work developing from a single motif.

A downloadable booking form may be found on the Festival's website - please scroll to the bottom of the page.