Chamber music is perhaps the field in which Joseph Haydn best experimented and asserted his formal and expressive conquests. The quartets, in particular, hold a privileged place in the musician’s work, as in the evolution of the genre: Haydn took the string quartet at its beginnings to transform it completely and bring it to the sensitive “threshold” of Romanticism. The Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross, composed in 1787, appears as a suite of nine pieces of fascinating intelligence and yet so accessible in its approach. It is a work of rare elevation that Haydn considered the best of all his compositions.
Two centuries later, its religious and deeply mystical meaning is combined in an extraordinary way with Henryk Górecki’s very first string quartet. It is clear that Already it is dusk, consisting of a single movement of almost 17 minutes and oriented on twilight themes, develops a unique link with Haydn’s mythical work. A composition imagined through the prayer of a child, of a musical and emotional power similar to its elder, like a contemporary resurgence of the Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross…