Shanghai Concert Hall | Full programmes for four September recitals, and Gerstein sets Liszt against Brahms

The Shanghai Concert Hall has four recitals and chamber programmes in September, and all four have now published their repertoire in full. They are not four interchangeable evenings; each one answers a different question.

21 September | Gerstein, and an old argument about what music is for

Kirill Gerstein puts a nineteenth-century disagreement on the stand. The first half is all Liszt's programme music: three Petrarch Sonnets and the Dante Sonata, both from the Italian book of Années de pèlerinage, both pointing straight at a text. The second half turns to two early works of Brahms, the Scherzo in E-flat minor, Op. 4, and the Third Piano Sonata in F minor, Op. 5, written around his twentieth year and among the pieces he carried to Schumann in 1853.

Between the two Brahms works sits a contemporary piece: the second of Brett Dean's Hommage à Brahms, "Hafenkneipenmusik". That set was written to be interleaved with Brahms's own late piano pieces, so its position here is the point rather than a garnish.

11 September | Lozakovich: three Bach works, in a rising order

Daniel Lozakovich plays nothing but Bach, three of the six works for violin alone, in an order that is itself the argument. The G minor sonata comes first, opening with its Adagio and a four-voice fugue; then the E major partita, the brightest of the six; and the recital ends on the D minor partita, whose final movement is the Chaconne. He signed to Deutsche Grammophon at fifteen and made his first record with Bach.

4 September | Kevin Zhu: an arrangement at each end

Kevin Zhu and the pianist Thomas Hoppe open with four of Brahms's Hungarian Dances as Joseph Joachim set them for violin and piano, Joachim being the violinist Brahms wrote his violin music for, and close with Váša Příhoda's arrangement of the waltz sequence from Der Rosenkavalier. The two works between them are originals from nearly the same years: Grieg's Third Sonata of 1887 and Strauss's E-flat major sonata, finished in 1888, after which Strauss turned to the tone poems and never wrote large-scale chamber music again.

19 September | Ensemble Schönbrunn Amsterdam: the people around Beethoven and Schubert

"Beyond the Masters" is a literal title. Beside Beethoven's Serenade in D, Op. 25, and Schubert's String Trio in B-flat, D. 471, the programme takes three composers who worked in the same circle. Ferdinand Ries was Beethoven's pupil and secretary and later wrote one of the earliest memoirs of him; Friedrich Hartmann Graf was a flautist-composer of the preceding generation; and the Haydn is one of the hundred-odd baryton trios he wrote for Prince Esterházy, arranged here for flute, viola and cello. Schubert finished only the first movement of D. 471. The ensemble plays on period instruments.

All four are in the Shanghai Concert Hall's main auditorium, sold through the hall's own channels. The complete programme, performers and prices for each are on its own page.

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