New Generation with Janine Jansen & Daniel Blendulf

How wonderful it is for young musicians to be on stage under the leadership of renowned artists. It is not only an important learning experience, but also an incentive to give everything you have as a musician. That is what the young musicians Ruslan Talas, Pauline van der Rest, Noga Shaham, Oliver Herbert and the Dutch Nikola Meeuwsen do during this New Generation Concert in Hertz with Janine Jansen and the Swedish conductor and cellist Daniel Blendulf in Arenski’s Second String Quartet and Dvořák’s Piano Quintet.

Since winning the Herbert Blomstedt Prize for conducting in 2014, Daniel Blendulf has been emphatically manifesting himself as a conductor. He trained as a cellist, but soon chose the path of conducting as well. Although in 2024 he conducts much more than he plays the cello, he is happy to make time for Janine Jansen, with whom he has worked regularly, to pick up the cello and to pass on his knowledge and inspiration in Arenski’s Second String Quartet to the younger generation.

Janine Jansen takes on the role of first violinist in one of the great masterpieces of the chamber music repertoire: Antonin Dvořák’s Second Piano Quintet. This work was created in 1887 when Dvořák wanted to revise an early quintet, now known as his First Piano Quintet. In the end, he went so far in adapting the work that he was actually writing an entirely new quintet in which Czech folk music merged beautifully with Dvořák’s bronze-coloured lyricism.