Beethoven/Brahms/Mendelssohn

“I know how hard it is to achieve a career as a classical musician, and the pandemic that we’ve all been through has only made it harder,” Gautier Capuçon explains. This is why the French cellist set up his own charity, the Fondation Gautier Capuçon, in 2022 to support outstanding young musicians at the beginning of their careers. This includes stage concerts in which the emerging talents play together with the internationally acclaimed concert soloist and chamber musician famous for his exquisite tone. In St. Pölten Capuçon will present a varied programme along with two of his foundation’s scholars, the French violinist Sarah Jégou-Sageman and the Italian pianist Martina Consonni. The music spans a Romantic arc from Beethoven and Mendelssohn to Brahms’s First Cello Sonata in E minor, op. 38, and his First Piano Trio in B major, op. 8, whose original version the composer once signed with a wink of the eye as “Kreisler junior” – like Schumann’s cycle Kreisleriana before it, an homage to E. T. A. Hoffmann’s legendary Kapellmeister.