Schwetzingen SWR Festival: Debut II – In Praise of Curiosity

Young musicians will perform Beethoven's *Gassenhauer Trio* as well as works by Clara Schumann and Vincent d'Indy, among others. The second concert by the ARD prize winners will feature two clarinet trios. Beethoven's *Gassenhauer Trio* is well known. But the highly virtuosic Opus 29 by French composer Vincent d'Indy, which is particularly challenging for piano and clarinet and takes many risks in terms of timbre and form, is not often heard in concert. Clara Schumann's three romances for violin and piano also open the door to the unknown in their clarinet arrangement. There is much to discover in this concert! For example, the Belgian composer Joseph Jongen, who lets the viola and piano dance together in his Opus 102 from 1935. Or the Czech Hans Krása. He was murdered in a concentration camp. Shortly before, he had set poems by Arthur Rimbaud to music there, in which a baritone is accompanied by three instruments. Finally, British composer and conductor Ethel Smyth fought for her right to study by going on hunger strike and campaigned for women's rights in England. "She is of the tribe of pioneers, the trailblazers," wrote Virginia Woolf about Smyth. "She has felled trees and blasted rocks and built bridges, thus paving the way for those who come after her."