Ballet Finale with Haydn: Kuss Quartett, Dancers of Hamburg Ballett

Closing concert

Haydn's "Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross" intertwined with the world premiere of the Five Bagatelles by Matthew Shlomowitz
Kuss Quartett
Josianne Flemming and Borja Bermudez - dance
Aleíx Martínez - dance and choreography

Haydn himself said that the "Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross" was perhaps the best and most powerful music he ever completed. Few compositions in the classical repertoire are as dramatic, pure, consoling, and at the same time as deeply unsettling. The work was originally written for the Good Friday liturgy of a Spanish monastery, as meditative music between sermons on the seven words. The individual Latin phrases are clearly audible and felt in each movement, in all their depth and character - conveying sorrow and despair at the touch of death, yet each movement closes with a tender turn to the major key, and thus to hope. The work reaches something in us that we all recognise and that connects us.

The artistic encounter between the string quartet and a ballet choreography created especially for the Sommerliche Musiktage by Hamburg Ballett's principal soloist Aleix Martínez makes this closing concert a singular event, one that brings out the immediate power of Joseph Haydn afresh. The movements are interspersed with the world premiere of the Five Bagatelles for string quartet by Matthew Shlomowitz, written for the Kuss Quartett.