Dmitri Torchinsky, violin
Lorena Manescu, violin
Raluca Gette-Stancel, violin
Egle Urbonaviciute, violin
Giovanni Pasini, viola
Andrea Mereutza, viola
Olivia Farkas, cello (pictured above)
Christoph Schmitz, cello


The monthly free chamber music concert by members of the Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra, in the atrium of IM Pei's magnificent Museum of Islamic Art, with the West Bay skyline as a backdrop. No tickets or reservations required. All ages welcome.

Octet for Strings in E-flat Major, op. 20 (1825)
Felix Mendelssohn (b. Hamburg, 1809; d. Leipzig, 1847)

Mendelssohn was a polymathic prodigy who found his own distinctive musical voice at the age of 16. There have been other precocious composers: Mozart, Saint-Saëns, and Richard Strauss come to mind. Some composers peaked early: Rossini, Sibelius, and Ives all who lived for considerable life spans after effectively giving up composing. Yet others bloomed late: It took considerable time for Haydn, Beethoven, and Verdi to hit their stride. A few continued to produce masterworks approaching or even after their eightieth year—Verdi, Richard Strauss, Vaughan Williams, and Elliott Carter (100 and still going!) are notable examples. But it is difficult to name another composer (always with the exception of Mozart) who could, as Mendelssohn did, produce one of his most enduring works when he was 16 years old. By the year 1825, when Mendelssohn composed his Octet for Strings, he was already a published composer who had written a dozen string symphonies as well as his Symphony #1 for full orchestra. In that year his professional future enjoyed a considerable boost when his third piano quartet, hot off the press, received the blessing of Cherubini, the influential director of the Paris Conservatoire. But it was in the Octet that Mendelssohn forged his own inimitable style, modeling Bach for counterpoint, Mozart for grace, and Beethoven for power—to paraphrase the New Grove Dictionary of Music.

Although Mendelssohn scored his Octet for Strings to include two combined string quartets, he made little use of the antiphonal quartet-versus-quartet possibilities that might suggest themselves. Instead, he found an endless variety of ways to combine the four violins, two violas and two cellos. Often the instruments work in pairs, the two violas having similar musical material during a passage, for example, or the two “first” violins working as a team. At other times there is a mix-and-match approach, with the first and second violins joining the first viola and the second cello to make a quartet, or the four lower instruments alternating with the four upper ones. When all eight instruments join together, the effect may be impressively full (at the end of the final Presto), softly spooky (at the end of the Scherzo), or thrillingly focused when all instruments play the same fast passage in unison and provide the fuoco (“fire”) toward the middle of the opening Allegro moderato, ma con fuoco movement. Mendelssohn acknowledged that his inspiration for the Scherzo was the famous Walpurgisnacht (“Witches’ Sabbath”) scene from his friend Goethe’s Faust. Mendelssohn was so pleased with the Scherzo that he later used a more fully orchestrated version of it as a substitute movement when he conducted his Symphony #1. The Octet was published in 1830, the year Mendelssohn, then age 21, turned down the offer of a professorship in music at the University of Berlin.

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