Stars & Strings

As a highly talented violinist, Antonia Rankersberger has been at home on the concert stage since her early youth, both as a soloist and, since 2018, as a member of one of the most remarkable young string quartets, the Simply Quartet. She presents her violin Ferdinando Gagliano (1770-1780, Naples), owned by the Austrian National Bank, in a multi-layered programme in the Stars & Strings series. Her partner on the piano, Adela Liculescu, has already been awarded many prizes, including the Prix du Piano Bern (2018), the Brahms Competitions in Detmold and in Pörtschach (2017) and the Bösendorfer Piano Competition (2015).

Antonia Rankersberger plays Bach’s monumental Sonata in C Major as an overture. Schubert’s early Sonata D 285, a work by the then-19-year-old, adds its unmistakable melancholy mood to the Mozart school of the ideal sonata. The Five Melodies op. 35a by Sergei Prokofiev are a reworking of the Five Songs without Words, which the Russian composer dedicated to the singer Nina Koschlitz in 1920. The finale, the Violin Sonata No. 3, reminded Johannes Brahms’ friend Elisabeth Herzogenberg of Guido Reni’s ceiling fresco in the Casino Ludovisi in Rome, a copy of which hung in Brahms’ study: “It has what the finale needs above all else: sweeping traction in the highest degree. Like the steeds of the Aurora in that magnificent painting, it storms along, and one only rests with the soothing, solemnly beautiful second theme.”