Claire Booth soprano
Charlotte Saluste-Bridoux violin
Alban Gerhardt cello
Joseph Havlat piano

Main image: Charlotte Saluste Bridoux © Kaupo Kikkas

This compellingly eclectic programme includes music by our two Festival featured composers Judith Weir and Unsuk Chin, two striking works by Thomas Larcher, and Schubert’s timeless masterpiece.

Schubert’s Fantasie, a staple of the repertoire, is a work of great virtuosity and shimmering strange beauty. The technical and imaginative capabilities of the players are put to the service of a mysterious unfolding drama which Schubert based on his own song Sei Mir Gegrüsst! – “I greet you”.

Judith Weir’s mini-opera for solo voice, King Harald’s Saga, is performed by soprano Claire Booth in her first appearance of the Festival. We also follow on from Sunday afternoon with two more works by Thomas Larcher. Of Splinters, the composer writes: “the splinters of the title have ‘regressed’ into entire trees: the imagined concepts have been splintered through the compositional process … an image of one’s own soul and its abysses makes its way forward”. “My illness” is based on extracts from interviews with patients of mental-health facilities, which Larcher describes as being of “a strong inner power, yet [they] do not claim to convey an overall picture of these people. There rather appear snatches from their world like a stroboscope”.

Plus Joseph Havlat begins our two-part presentation of the extraordinary Piano Etudes of Unsuk Chin, which is completed by Rolf Hind on Thursday 20 June.

Click here to download performance programme notes.