Northern Lights: Darlington Quartet

WAAPA’s String Camerata and the Darlington Quartet present Holberg Suite Op.40, Edvard Grieg’s joyous 200th birthday gift to Norwegian writer, philosopher and playwright, Ludvig Holberg.

It’s a sparkling reimaging of the Baroque music that Holberg would have heard during his lifetime. Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8 in C minor, here masterfully adapted for string orchestra by Rudolf Barshai, was written after the composer’s visit to a still-devastated Dresden in 1960 and is dedicated ‘to the victims of fascism and war’. But this bleak and searing work, whose principal theme is made up of the composer’s own initials, is also deeply personal.