Schwetzingen SWR Festival: Back to Nature!

Surrounded by the Schwetzingen Palace Gardens, the title is the program. The Signum Quartet with Schubert, Haydn, and Adès. “Beautiful world, where are you? – Return, lovely blossom age of nature! Ah! Only in the fairyland of songs does your golden trace still live.” Thus laments Friedrich Schiller in The Gods of Greece. Franz Schubert turned the poem into a song, which opens a program at the Signum Quartet as a string piece, reflecting on the roots of art music – and continually longing to return to them. The string quartet in which Schubert processes his song (and especially his stage music for the play Rosamunde) is part of this, as no other of Schubert's quartets so distinctly, so catchingly, and so naturally depicts a lost idyll. This fits well with the fifth work from Haydn's Prussian Quartets, which carries the subtitle The Dream due to the tenderness and tranquility of its predominantly piano-held slow movement. Also fitting is the string quartet that Thomas Adès composed in 1994, as here the Brit wanders through the ancient land of longing, Arcadia, in seven images. The travel companion that inspires Adès’ sounds is an old acquaintance. His name is Franz Schubert, and when he sings, he does so for a long time. Heavenly!