The program
The artists
The concert
After touring across the United States, eight musicians from Camerata Nordica come home — and and is very happy to share this program in the region.
Chamber music at its most unguarded begins with Mozart’s Sestetto concertante, drawn from the Sinfonia concertante. Six soloists share the musical material with characteristic wit and grace, in a work that exemplifies Mozart’s gift for making complexity feel effortless. Every voice matters; every exchange is alive.
Shostakovich’s Two Pieces for String Octet were composed when he was barely sixteen, yet they already carry the full weight of his personality: ironic, intense, and utterly uncompromising. The Prelude pulses with nervous energy, while the Scherzo darts forward with a dry humour that is unmistakably his own.
The centrepiece of the evening is Mendelssohn’s Octet in E-flat major, performed entirely by heart. Written at the age of sixteen — as if in answer to Shostakovich across the centuries — it remains one of the most astonishing achievements in all of chamber music: eight voices woven together with a freedom and exuberance that still sounds miraculous. Playing without scores, the musicians bring an immediacy and presence to the music that is difficult to describe and impossible to forget.
Woven throughout the programme is Swedish folk music, arranged for string octet — familiar melodies that bring a sense of place and grounding between the larger works, and a reminder of where this ensemble calls home.
