The day after my trip to the South Bank, I was back in Bath to hear Nikolaij Znaider and the LSO Chamber Ensemble play two string sextets: Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht and Brahms’ first sextet.
I heard the Schoenberg when it was last played in Bath a few years ago by the Vienna String Sextet. I felt that in both pieces there was a tendency for the other players to defer to Znaider on first violin, and they seemed rather less at ease in the Schoenberg (both the sound and the body language of the players suggested this). However the Schoenberg performance was what I took away with me, perhaps because the Brahms just isn’t that interesting a piece. Or maybe after hearing lots of early 20th-century Vienna I’d reached saturation point.
The concert is available still on BBC Radio 3’s Listen Again, though I notice that they reverse the order so that the Brahms precedes the Schoenberg.