Quirine Viersen - Silke Avenhaus

The Dutch cellist Quirine Viersen starts with the unavoidable Beethoven and ends up with two less obvious composers for cello, Samuel Barber and Dimitri Shostakovich. She chose Beethoven's third sonata, written in 1807 while he was working on his Fifth Symphony. It is quite simply one of the most perfect chamber pieces in the history of music, and reminiscent of the first Razumovsky quartet. We hear a more chivalrous Beethoven in the seven variations on a merry little duet from 'The Magic Flute', probably written out of sheer admiration for Mozart. The American composer Samuel Barber (1910-1981) wrote his Neo-Romantic Cello Sonata in 1932, when he had only just graduated. It is an emotional, direct and heartwarming piece. Two years later, during the winter of 1934, Shostakovich (1906-1975) wrote his Sonata opus 40. According to the cellist Viktor Kubatski, who gave the first performance of the work together with the composer, we owe this sonata to the sleepless nights Shostakovich was enduring as a consequence of a marital conflict. But its sometimes lyrical, sometimes sarcastic tone transcends its anecdotal origins.