Kammermúsíkklúbburinn: Dohnányi, Hindemith and Strauss

Kammermúsíkklúbburinn, the chamber music club founded in 1957, continues its seventieth season with three works written between 1885 and 1919, by composers born in the nineteenth century who all lived beyond the Second World War. Ernő Dohnányi's Serenade in C major for string trio, Op. 10, comes first, in five movements, with Brahms and Hungarian folk music both audible in it. Guðbjartur Hákonarson and Elena Postumi then play Paul Hindemith's first sonata for viola and piano, Op. 11 No. 4. Hindemith was a violinist who turned to the viola around the time he wrote it, and Guðbjartur, who trained on the violin and joined the viola section of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra in 2026, is playing a viola sonata in public for the first time. After the interval comes Richard Strauss's Piano Quartet in C minor, Op. 13, which he wrote at twenty; he was at the piano himself when it was first performed in 1885. The club has never had it on a programme before. Pétur Björnsson plays violin and Urh Mrak cello.