Music for chamber ensembles

On 12 December – 2 February, a book exhibition “Music for chamber ensembles” runs in the Music and audio materials reading room (room 305).

Compositions by Russian, Belarusian and foreign composers for bow and stringed instruments are on display.

”Chamber music” (from Italian “camera” – a chamber) is a kind of music designed for playing in small premises or home music-making. Originally secular music was called “chamber” as opposite to church music. At court yard a special post of chamber-musician existed.

This music can express a broad scope of lyrical emotions and spiritual states of a person. The main difference between chamber and orchestral music is that each party is played by sole instrument instead of a group of instruments. There is a variety of forms and genres of chamber music: sonatas, duets, trios, quartets, miniatures, suites and fugues.

In the 18th century chamber music became one of the most important genres of music art.

In Russia chamber music appeared in the 1770s. Composer D. Bortnyansky wrote the first instrumental ensembles. Later on Russian chamber music was developed by composers A. Alyabyev and M. Glinka to reach its peak in works by P. Tchaikovsky, A. Borodin and S.Taneev. Among the compositions which became classical there are A. Borodin’s second quartet with its well-known nocturne, quartets by P. Tchaikovsky and S. Taneev’s sixth quartet which B. Asafyev named “the book of books in Russian quartet music”.

The exhibition presents over 90 documents from the library collections: printed music and audio records. Among them there are compositions by А. Glazunov, М. Ippolitov-Ivanov, R. Glier А. Borodin, P. Tchaikovsky, S. Taneev, А. Corelli, F. Kreisler, М. Ravel, E. Grieg, F. Shubert, P. Hindemith, W. A. Mozart, C. Franck, N. Tchurkin, N. Aladov, V. Zolotarev, D. Smolsky and others.

Contact phone number: (375 17) 293 27 52.