On Sunday, February 23rd at 4pm in the Bridges Centre, Monmouth the finale of the 25th Wye Valley Chamber Music Festival will be an inspiring and eye opening concert given by musicians of international renown who are either members of celebrated string quartets, (including the Elias, Sacconi and Kuss), orchestra leaders, (Mahler Concert Orchesra, WNO) or conservatoire professors (Essen and RWCMD)

Daniel Tong, Festival artistic Co director explains. “Throughout this year’s Festival, we have programmed music from less frequently heard composers alongside that of their better known contemporaries. At our Finale concert in the Bridges Centre, we will hear Weinberg’s 5th string quartet, together with Shostakovich’s string quartet No 3. Born in Warsaw, the son of Moldavian Jews, Mieczyslaw Weinberg was the sole member of his family to escape from the Nazis when they invaded Poland in September 1939: he found safety in the Soviet Union, but both his parents and his younger sister died in the concentration camp at Trawniki. Weinberg was a contemporary of Shostakovich and the two were both lauded during their lifetimes behind the 'iron curtain', but his music never achieved the same worldwide acclaim. These quartets were written within a year of each other during the dark days at the end of the Second World War. Weinberg's musical language is perhaps even more colourful and inventive than that of his more famous friend, and together they make a deeply moving and powerful pair."

The concert concludes with music from another Russian composer,Tchaikovsky, his string sextet, “Souvenir of Florence.”

Stephen Walsh, Chair of the Wye Valley Chamber Music Festival’s trustees, writes

“Notwithstanding its subtitle, Tchaikovsky’s string sextet – his last chamber work - has hardly anything to do with Italy. He was in Florence in early 1890, composing his opera The Queen of Spades, when he jotted down the melody that became the theme of the Adagio. But he had been planning the work since at least 1887 and when he resumed work on the sextet in June 1890, he found the problems of the ensemble intractable. ‘I began it the day before yesterday,’ he told his brother Modest, ‘and composing it is an unbelievable effort. I’m bothered not so much by a lack of ideas, but by the novelty of the genre. You need six independent, and at the same time homogeneous, voices. It’s incredibly difficult’ Tchaikovsky eventually cracked the difficulty: ‘Ah! Modya,’ he wrote to his brother three weeks later, ‘my sextet is wonderful and the fugue at the end is charming. Terrific, how pleased I am with myself.’ Charming the work certainly is, if not quite as distinctive as the opera that immediately preceded it or the ballet (The Nutcracker) that followed a few months later. The finale is pure, brilliant Tchaikovsky, and while the fugal passages are admirable, it is the tunes one remembers” .

Concert tickets are £20 (£5 for students) from ticketsource.co.uk/wyevalleyfestival or on the door. Advance booking is strongly recommended.