Louisa Staples & Boris Kusnezow

In the organizer's words:

Louisa Staples: Violin

(Beethovenfest Talents)

Boris Kuznetsov: piano

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Violin Sonata KV 304

Leoš Janáček: Violin Sonata

Eugène Ysaÿe: "Poème élégiaque"

Ludwig van Beethoven: Violin Sonata No. 9 "Kreutzer Sonata"

Louisa Staples studies in one of Germany's most renowned violin classes at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music in Berlin. She has already gained impressive concert experience, including at Carnegie Hall in New York. In the intimate Rittersaal at Namedy Castle, the Beethovenfest Talents scholarship holder will play tragic, even fateful works by four composers from very different periods. Mozart's Sonata in E minor surprises with an unusually sombre tone. Janáček wrote his only violin sonata under the impression of the First World War, while he, as he said, "heard the steel crashing in my miserable mind". Ysaÿe's elegiac tone poem tells the tragedy of "Romeo and Juliet". Composed for a violin in scordatura, the instrument sounds even darker due to the lowest string being tuned down a tone. The finale is Beethoven's famous "Kreutzer Sonata", a demanding and abysmal work in which the composer seems to wrestle with an irreconcilable fate.