Concert No. 7

There is hardly a more authentic venue for performing Arnold Schönberg's early, hyper-Romantic string sextet than the dusky ruins of a convent. The composer wrote the piece in merely three weeks in 1899; the music welling forth in a single vast movement follows Richard Dehmel's symbolist poem it is based on. A man and a woman are walking in the night. They are in love, but the woman carries a sinful-sweet burden: someone else's child. The highly intense music requires extremely intense musicians. There is hardly a more authentic group of performers than the ensemble led by Barnabás Kelemen.