Schedule

Trio Theros: Anna Agafia, violin · Jonathan Swensen, cello · Gustav Piekut, piano

The Queen's Hall at the Black Diamond will provide the setting for a remarkable musical event, as internationally acclaimed musicians, former students, family members and close colleagues gather for a major tribute concert celebrating the life and work of the violinist, composer, arranger and music educator Alexandre Zapolski (1951–2025). Works by Alexandre Zapolski alongside musical tributes. With Anna Agafia Egholm, Alva Holm, Andrias Blaasvær, Denis Kozhukhin, Vera Panitch, Vasilisa Koroleva, Jonathan Swensen and Tanja Zapolski; Absalon String Quartet, Stefan Cholakov, Trio Grande, Trio Zoom and the Zapolski Piano Quintet, with filmed tributes from the Danish String Quartet and Novo Quartet. Hosted by Frederikke Ingemann.

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Uplifting, inspiring, hopeful, energizing, innovative, spiritual: all of these adjectives apply to Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. To say that the world needs them now more than ever is an understatement. They represent what humankind at its finest can achieve, and because of that, we gather around them faithfully every season.

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Experience music of the late 20th and 21st centuries, including premieres, in the intimate setting of the Rose Studio at CMS. Designed in collaboration with CMS artists, Sonic Spectrum concerts are an opportunity to hear the boundaries of chamber music expanded in real time.

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Jonathan plays a full concerto program with his brother Nicholas Swensen for the first time.

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Swensen returns to Wigmore Hall for Messiaen's Quartet for the end of time with Alan Gilbert, Martin Fröst, Inon Barnatan, and Renee Flemming. The catastrophe of the Second World War and the consequences of it shaped both works in this powerful lunchtime programme. Renée Fleming, one of the great voices of our time, joins an exceptional line-up of instrumentalists. She takes centre stage in a chamber-scale version of Richard Strauss’s 4 Last Songs, valedictory pieces created under the postwar shadow cast by Nazi Germany’s defeat. The concert’s first half belongs to the Quartet for the End of Time, an apocalyptic work inspired by the Book of Revelation and composed while Messiaen was a prisoner of war.

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In a program combining the novel and traditional, a truly avant-garde quintet by Boccherini from 1780 is followed by another quintet from the Romantic Neapolitan composer d’Ambrosio, both works calling for two cellos. Dvořák’s ever popular Sextet for Strings is a virtual Bohemian symphony, which infuses a grand classical structure with irresistible folk spirit.