6èmes Rencontres Culturelles d'Usson : Haydn & Onslow, correspondances harmoniques

The Mycélium quartet, whose refinement has enchanted the Rencontres Culturelles d'Usson for several years, invites us to rediscover the Auvergne composer George Onslow, who lived very close to Usson. A unique moment between classicism and romanticism!

It all started with Joseph Haydn who took the art of the string quartet to new heights and established its classical form throughout his immense corpus of 68 quartets. And it is perhaps with his opus 76, commissioned by Hungarian Count József Erdödy in 1797, where Haydn composed the quartets The Quints, The Emperor and The Sunrise, that he sublimated the genre.
Thus in the Sunrise quartet, Haydn takes us into a dreamlike world where the strings of the quartet, like fine brushes, dialogue with each other with an elegance and refinement mixing learned music, the initial Allegro con spirito full of mysteries or of the Adagio which sees the sun unfold gently, and popular music, in the Menuetto in the form of a waltz or the Finale-allegro, a slow then rapid csardas, to paint four miniatures from the Danube plains to the foothills of the Alps in a soothing freshness.

For his part, the Anglo-Auvergne composer George Onslow in 1815 took up the torch of the art of the Haydn quartet, integrating the science of Mozart or Beethoven, to be the gateway to romanticism. His quartet op.8 n°1, which he dedicates to his friend the virtuoso violinist Pierre Baillot, first violin professor at the Paris Conservatory, is its subtle continuity: Classicism in the background, but already the torments, the darkness announce Schubert a decade later in the initial Allegro; introduction like a funeral march and development oscillating between minor and major. An Adagio reminiscent of Mozart and, again Schubert, see Mendelssohn, for a short Minuetto cleverly dosed with popular musette. Finally a Final-presto which brilliantly mixes the different atmospheres of the quartet as a whole, only to end up disappearing...

George Onslow is undoubtedly a great master of the quartet, at a time when chamber music was neglected in France, and it is the four performers of the Mycélium Quartet who bring to life with the sensitivity that we know from them, these masterpieces so brilliant in the history of music.

Joseph Haydn > 1732 -1809
Quartet in Bb M. op.76 n°4 - Sunrise - 1797
Allegro with spirit
Adagio
Menuetto, allegro
allegro ma non troppo

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George Onslow > 1784 -1853
Quartet in C m. op.8 no. 1 - 1815
Largo - Allegro agitato
Adagio
Minuetto, allegretto
Finale, presto

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