‎L’Auditori’s Chamber Music season 2018-19 draws to a close with its two final ‎programmes, featuring the violinist Chad Hoopes and the Trio Arriaga. ‎

Chad Hoopes is performing at L’Auditori this evening ‎accompanied by pianist David Fung. At 8 pm in Sala 2 Oriol Martorell, there ‎will be a rare opportunity to enjoy, for the first time in Barcelona, his facet as a chamber ‎musician with a repertoire of a Romantic and Impressionist nature.‎

In Sonata in G minor, L. 140, the last work by Claude ‎Debussy, we will be able to appreciate how in his final years the composer moved ‎away from the Impressionist style he had championed, as well as savour the fusion of ‎classical elements with gypsy violin techniques. Sonata No. 2 in G major, M. ‎‎77 is an exciting mixture of styles, even including some blues, where ‎‎Maurice Ravel exploits the contrast in the timbre of the two instruments. ‎

With Sonata No. 1 in D minor, Op. 75, Camille Saint-‎Saëns inspired one of the most delightful passages in Swann’s Way, ‎the celebrated work by Marcel Proust, and set a perpetual technical challenge for all violinists. ‎Finally, Sonata No. 3 in D minor by Eugène Ysaÿe is a ‎solo violin piece that, in one single movement, invokes the atmosphere of Bach’s sonatas ‎and the virtuosity of Paganini’s Caprices.‎

The last performance of the season is brought to us on 30 May at 8 pm in ‎Sala 2 Oriol Martorell by the Trio Arriaga, consisting of Daniel ‎Ligorio, Juan Luis Gallego and David Apellániz, ‎‎three soloists of international prestige.‎

The Trio Arriaga is one of the most compelling national chamber music ensembles of ‎today and is at the forefront of a resurgence of the trio with piano in Catalonia, as ‎confirmed by the emergence of the young Trio Pedrell and Trio Fortuny ensembles.‎

In their concert at L’Auditori, the Trio Arriaga will present two great works from ‎chamber music repertoire that are related by both the nationality of their ‎composers and their elegiac nature. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky wrote the ‎‎ Piano trio in A minor, Op. 50 in 1882 in memory of his friend ‎and mentor Nikolai Rubinstein, who had died the previous year. ‎‎Shostakovich’s trio was written in 1944, when he was crushed by the ‎weight of the years of war he had endured and the effects of the death of his beloved friend ‎Ivan Sollertinsky, to whom he dedicated the Piano trio in E minor, Op. ‎‎67.‎

Despite having a common source of inspiration, each of the works expresses the ‎despondency provoked by death from different perspectives: Tchaikovsky’s is tinged with an ‎overwhelming Romantic sentimentalism, whilst Shostakovich transports us to his world of ‎extreme contrasts, through which he expresses the suffering and horror of a humanity able ‎to carry out the greatest of atrocities.‎