Peasmarsh Festival: East Sussex

Anthony Marwood, Richard Lester, Tim Horton, Sascha Bota, Alec Frank-Gemmill, Benjamin Gilmore, Emily Nebel, Sally Pendlebury

Strauss Cello Sonata in F major, Op. 6, TrV 115
Haydn String Quartet Op. 50 No. 5 ‘The Dream’
Brahms Horn Trio in E flat major, Op. 40

Dedicated to, and premiered by, Hanuš Wihan (with whose wife Dora Strauss was in love, exchanging romantic letters over many years) Strauss’s Sonata – completed when the composer was 19 years old – was well received and quickly became a central part of the cello repertoire. Haydn’s Dream Quartet, one of the Prussian Quartets cheekily sold to publishers in both Austria and England, is followed by Brahms’ melancholic Horn Trio performed here, as the composer intended, on natural horn, despite the prominence of the valve horn by this point in the 19th Century.