As part of “The Music of Budapest, Prague and Vienna” festival running at the Kennedy Center through March 29, six string players from the National Symphony Orchestra perform a free concert Friday on the Millennium Stage in the center’s Grand Foyer.
“There’s a lot of repertoire involved with this festival and, in a one-hour format, we are doing five movements from two string sextets written by Johannes Brahms,” said David Teie, a cello player with the NSO and a member of the string chamber ensemble.
He is joined onstage by ensemble members that include violinists Alexandra Osborne and Joel Fuller, violists Abigail Evans and Mahoko Eguchi and fellow cellist Steven Honigberg, a group of players Teie calls “first-rate.”
| Onstage |
| NSO Prelude Chamber Concert: Johannes Brahms |
| Where: Millennium Stage, Kennedy Center, 2700 F St. NW |
| When: 6 p.m. Friday |
| Info: Free; 800-444-1324; kennedy-center.org |
“I have loved [Brahms’] music for so many years,” Teie continued. “He wrote these sextets when he was in love and they are full of a huge and passionate beauty. It’s great, great music.”
A member of the NSO since 1984, Teie maintains that the ones who play chamber music are the ones who definitely want to play it — that there is music in the chamber repertoire that just cannot be found in orchestral texts. Brahms excelled in this musical format.
Brahms was a German composer and pianist whose professional career was inextricably tied to the Romantic period. Although born in Hamburg, most of his life was spent in Vienna, Austria, where he took his place in the musical scene with his compositions for piano, chamber ensembles and symphony orchestra. His popularity was considerable and his chamber music considered some of the finest written.
“There are some kinds of music that, like fine wine, are an acquired taste,” Teie observed. “Then, there are other kinds of music that are like Snickers bars — they just taste good to everybody all of the time. There’s something about Brahms, I think, that has a little bit of both. For us who have played it for decades, we can always find more in the music. And yet, for someone hearing it with little or no background in music, [they] can hear it and think, ‘Oh, that’s great music.’ ”
