Beethoven
Romanoff Schwarzberg, Swiss Piano Trio

Nora Romanoff Schwarzberg, viola
Swiss Piano Trio

Angela Golubeva, violin
Franz Ortner, cello
Martin Lucas Staub, piano

L. van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Piano Quartet in E-flat major op. 16a

25’ | Admission €10

The Swiss Piano Trio, internationally recognised for its technical perfection and expressive intensity, joins forces with the personality of Nora Romanoff Schwarzberg, a leading soloist and chamber musician in major European institutions, to offer the Trame Sonore audience a unique listening experience.

The programme celebrates Beethoven’s early style with the Quartet op. 16, which belongs to the composer’s first creative period, a time of strong openness towards Viennese classical models. Conceived between 1796 and 1797 as an arrangement of the Quintet op. 16 for piano and winds — of which it retains structure and spirit — the work is an explicit homage to Mozart: after a solemn introduction (Grave), the music unfolds into an Allegro of refined clarity. While the Andante reaches a moment of pure and imaginative lyricism, the final Rondo releases a sense of pastoral festivity, closing the concert with a vital impulse that perfectly embodies that “brief, happy period of stylistic irresponsibility” typical of the young genius from Bonn, still working within the models of his time but already with a fully recognisable voice.

The performance takes place in the Hall of Tapestries of the Palazzo Vescovile, where the mythological and bucolic subjects of the precious eighteenth-century Flemish tapestries provide an ideal and immersive setting for the sonic narrative of Beethoven’s genius.

Text curated by Desirée Blundi