ABU DHABI — On paper, the 2025 Abu Dhabi Festival’s chamber music concert “Unique Encounters with Rising Stars” looked precarious. A program that features the nascent works of Schubert, Sibelius, and Glière forecast a light touch. In concert, nothing could have been further from this foreboding expectation. On April 26, for a full house at New York University Abu Dhabi’s Blue Hall, four of the world’s leading young string players gave effusive, radiantly virtuosic performances of miniature works that most of us would not encounter in a concert setting. Kudos, yes, to the performers but also to the concert curation by the festival’s deputy executive director, conductor Toufic Maatouk.
The musicians — Yamen Saadi (violin), Sara Ferrández (viola), Kian Soltani (cello), and Pablo Ferrández (cello) — may all be millennials or Gen Z, but their status and regard is already substantive and frankly intimidating. All have performed as soloists with major orchestras. Saadi is concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic while Soltani and Ferrández have exclusive recording contracts. Each biography radiates with collaborators including Anne Sophie Mutter and Martha Argerich. Their reputation belies their youth.
The charm offensive began with the opening performance of Schubert’s Trio in B-flat major, written when the composer was still a teenager. While some of the second movement is incomplete, the performance was consummate. Saadi, Ferrández and Soltani offered a buoyant rendition of a blossoming work that echoed with the melodic voices of Mozart and Haydn. Here the crystalline sweetness of Saadi’s tone hovered with consistent assurance.
In a set of violin and viola duets by Sibelius, violist Sara Ferrández stepped into the limelight with her confident and boldly projected tone. It was easy to appreciate the influence of one of her teachers, the irrepressible Tabea Zimmermann, in her full-bodied approach. The duet arrangements of these early works featured the miniature Water Droplets, which is purported to have been written when Sibelius was a mere nine years of age.
A performance of selections from Glière’s Eight Pieces, Op. 39, for Violin and Cello gave audiences an opportunity to luxuriate in darker romantic string textures redolent of Russian church music on the one hand and folk influences on the other. Small issues of balance crept in between Saadi’s honeyed violin and Soltani’s rich vibrato cello, but these were not debilitating in their otherwise caressing approach.
Muscular virtuosity, preposterous technique, and uninhibited joy were the hallmarks of the evening’s highlight — a performance of Jean Baptiste Barrière’s Sonata for Two Cellos in G major. The work itself is full of an indefatigable conviction to demonstrate the breadth and depth of the cello’s capabilities. Soltani and Ferrández not only rose to that challenge, but their innate musicianship and pinpoint accuracy in intonation also took the sonata to an ecstatic stratosphere.
Anton Arensky’s String Quartet No.2 in A minor, scored unusually for violin, viola, and two cellos, capitalized on the obvious musical synchronicity and camaraderie of the players. The work embraces motifs from the Orthodox church mass of the dead, with the second movement setting its course as a set of variations based on Tchaikovsky’s song “Legend” from his Sixteen Songs for Children. Saadi’s poised leadership, together with the easy conversational approach to chamber music ensured another success in this charming evening.
The Abu Dhabi Festival, now 21 years old, is a jewel for the capital of the United Arab Emirates. In 2024 it snared the talents of South Korean pianist Yuchan Lim and the Labèque Sisters. Thanks to founder and artistic director Huda Ibrahim Al Khamis-Kanoo, the festival has a cosmopolitan approach. Its forays over recent years have extended to performances and collaborations across the globe, including the Opera National de Paris.
