When the reed trio meets the string quartet

Thursday 6 August 2026 – 21h
Eglise Saint-Jean, Aiguines

For this concert, the Festival’s musicians will travel to the hills above Lake Sainte-Croix, to the village of Aiguines.

The wind players, whom you may have heard performing individually at the previous concert, come together to perform works for woodwind trio. This ensemble, emblematic of 20th-century French music, evokes a wide range of contrasting moods: incidental music that is by turns light-hearted, sparkling and sometimes clownish, and at other times tender and melancholic.

The oboe continues the concert, joined by three string instruments, taking us back to the 18th century with the Oboe Quartet by Jean Christian Bach, son of Johann Sebastian Bach and, notably, Mozart’s composition teacher.

To bring this concert to a close, the quintessential chamber music ensemble makes its very first appearance: the string quartet. Despite the number assigned to it, Ludwig van Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 3, Op. 18, is almost certainly the first to have been written by the German composer. It therefore reflects the classical compositional traditions of Haydn and Mozart, with whom he formed what is known as the ‘First Viennese School’.