JazzAscona Meets classicAscona: Vision String Quartet & Elina Duni

“JazzAscona meets classicAscona” promises an evening of cross-cultural encounters.

Swiss singer Elina Duni, British guitarist Rob Luft, and Swiss flugelhornist Matthieu Michel — or its fusion of jazz, folk, and chanson. They join forces with the Berlin-based Vision String Quartet, which typically performs its concerts from memory and while standing. This creates an energetic, almost pop-like stage presence. In addition to Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 7, the musicians will present specially arranged or improvised works that blend elements of jazz, pop, and rock with classical music.

The String Quartet No. 7 in F-sharp minor, Op. 108, completed in March 1960, is the shortest of Shostakovich’s quartets and at the same time one of his most concentrated. The work is dedicated “In Memoriam” to his first wife Nina, whose death deeply affected the composer. It is not a monumental requiem, but a concentrated act of remembrance in which pain, dream, anger, and tenderness are condensed within a tightly bounded musical space—a musical monument to a lost love that, in its brevity, contains an entire world.