Viola Fest

As part of its Chamber Music Cycle, the Auditorio de Tenerife is hosting The Viola Fest concert will bring together four soloists from the Berlin Philharmonic and Macarena Pesutic, the festival’s artistic director.

Viola Fest presents an outstanding programme in the Chamber Hall of the Auditorio de Tenerife, featuring works by Prokofiev, Smetana and Mendelssohn and tracing major landmarks in the European chamber music repertoire from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.

The first half opens with Sergei Prokofiev’s String Quartet No. 2 in F major, Op. 92, composed during the Second World War and drawing on traditional Kabardian themes. Here, Prokofiev combines the rhythmic drive and formal clarity of his musical language with a refined exploration of timbre inspired by Caucasian folklore.

This is followed by Bedřich Smetana’s String Quartet No. 1 in E minor, From My Life, one of the most intimate and autobiographical statements in the chamber music repertoire. The viola assumes a particularly significant role in the work: far from being confined to a secondary harmonic function, it becomes a voice of profound expressive depth, articulating moments of introspection and dialogue that underpin the quartet’s emotional architecture.

After the interval, the concert culminates in Felix Mendelssohn’s String Quintet in B-flat major, Op. 87, a masterpiece of German Romanticism admired for the elegance of its contrapuntal writing, the lyrical breadth of its movements and its extraordinary balance between virtuosity and transparency of texture.

The programme is performed by Simon Roturier and Marlene Ito, violins; Naoko Shimizu and Macarena Pesutic, violas; and Ludwig Quandt, cello—an artistic collaboration of international calibre celebrating the rich sonorities and expressive range of chamber music.