Concert #4 – Contrasts

Friday 14th December, 7:30-9:30pm

107 Milton Rd, Milton QLD 4064

Adult $35 / Concession $25 / Student $15

Purchase your tickets here

PROGRAM

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Kegelstatt Trio, K. 498

Robert Schumann – Fantasiestucke, Op. 12

Gyorgy Kurtag – Hommage a R. Sch, Op. 15d

Interval

Leos Janacek – Violin Sonata

Bela Bartok – Contrasts, Sz. 111, BB 116

Please join the artists for a complementary glass of bubbles and sumptious nibbles after the event*

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ARTISTS

Lachlan O’Donnell (violin/viola)

Macarthur Clough (clarinet)

Alex Raineri (artistic director / piano)

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A concert of extreme contrasts, the music featured here is primarily for the unusual combination of clarinet, violin/viola and piano.

Mozart’s Kegelstatt Trio is the first work of it’s kind for this instrumentation and was premiered by the clarinetist Anton Stadler for whom the famous Clarinet Quintet and Clarinet Concerto were dedicated. Unbridled by drama, this carefree and sunny work sets the scene for a concert which all too swiftly departs for darker shores.

Composed in 1837, Schumann’s Fantasiestucke Op. 12 are a set of eight pieces for piano solo. Written with the characters Florestan and Eusebius in mind, this work is imbued with the subtext of a fascinating dialogue between these two characters that represent the duality of Schumann’s personality, the ‘active’ Florestan and ‘passive’ Eusebius.

Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag’s Hommage to Robert Schumannconsists of five brief segments (each under a minute long) concluding with a sixth more elaborate movement. Kurtag’s music is known for its penchant for miniatures and tendency towards a minimal approach to material, following on from the Second Viennese School (in particular the music of Anton Webern). The movement titled In Der Nacht correlates with Schumann’s night piece from the Op. 12 Fantasiestucke.

Staying with music from Hungary, Janacek’s Sonata for violin and piano was written in 1914 in a troubled time in the composers’ life. A short and concentrated work, it is intensely expressive and features frequent shifts of tempo and mood, oscillating between poles of tortured anxiety to extreme folk-inspired beauty.

Bartok’s Contrasts was commissioned by the jazz-clarinetist Benny Goodman and is based on Hungarian and Romanian dance melodies, while dually paying stylistic homage to it’s commissioner. At times grotesque and shrill, in other moments highly virtuosic or eerily depicting visions of the night, this trio is a masterpiece of twentieth-century chamber music, aptly concluding this program of contrasts.