This wonderful Monday morning programme brings together three very different works in an ode to motherhood.

Mozart’s famous String Quartet No. 15 in D minor is known for its dramatic and dark sound and is said to have been composed while his wife Constanze was giving birth. The piece has an intense emotional atmosphere and we constantly feel the inner turmoil and longing. Constanze stated that the sudden bursts of forte in the second movement echo her cries from the other room. 

A Cradle Song of the Lonely Mother, composed in 1924, is a haunting and intimate piano piece by American composer Amy Beach. A poetic miniature in the form of a berceuse, it evokes a scene of a mother rocking a cradle alone, possibly reflecting loss or deep loneliness… a mother singing to her deceased child?

Shortly after his mother’s death in 1972, Alfred Schnittke began sketching what would eventually become his Piano Quintet. It was a work in five movements for piano and string quartet, composed between 1972 and 1976. It was later arranged for symphony orchestra and renamed In Memoriam…

In an interview given by the composer in 1980, he said that his desire to write a “simple but sincere” musical tribute to his mother presented him with “an almost insoluble problem”: I couldn’t go on because I had to transfer what I had written from imaginary spaces, defined in terms of sound, to the psychological space defined by life, where unbearable pain seems almost insignificant and one has to fight for the right to use dissonance, consonance and assonance.

A 20th-century masterpiece, moving and hopeful at the same time.