RELAXED CONCERT: THE GENIUS OF BEETHOVEN

Ensemble 360

Crucible Playhouse, Sheffield
Saturday 6 December 2025, 2.00pm

Tickets:
£5 / carers free

Past Event
Ensemble 360 musicians
Home› What's on› RELAXED CONCERT: THE GENIUS OF BEETHOVEN

BEETHOVEN Sonata for Cello and Piano No.3 Op.69 (26’)
BEETHOVEN Trio for Piano, Clarinet and Cello Op.11 (20’) 

For this ‘Relaxed’ concert featuring Beethoven, doors will be left open, lights raised, a break-out space provided, and there will be less emphasis on the audience being quiet during the performance. People with an Autism Spectrum, sensory or communication disorder or learning disability, those with age-related impairments and parents/carers with babies are all especially welcome.

BEETHOVEN Ludwig van, Cello Sonata in A

i. Allegro ma non tanto
ii. Scherzo. Allegro molto
iii. Adagio cantabile – Allegro vivace
On 14 September 1808, the publisher Gottfried Christoph Härtel signed a remarkable contract with Beethoven for his most recent works: the document signed by the two of them that day shows that Breitkopf and Härtel had acquired the rights to the Fifth Symphony, the Pastoral Symphony, the two Piano Trios Op.70 and the Cello Sonata in A major. The Cello Sonata had been written in the winter of 1807–8 and by the time of its publication it bore a dedication to Baron Ignaz von Gleichenstein, a friend of the composer who helped him with financial matters as well as a being a talented amateur cellist. The first performance was given in Vienna on 5 March 1809, at a concert by the cellist Nikolaus Kraft with Baroness Dorothea von Ertmann (to whom Beethoven later dedicated his Piano Sonata Op.101). As in the Kreutzer Sonata for violin and piano, Beethoven begins this Cello Sonata with the string soloist unaccompanied, introducing the simple but utterly memorable opening idea, answered by the piano. The spacious melodic material of this movement shows Beethoven at his most flowing and song-like. The Scherzo, in A minor, is full of tense syncopation, followed by an Adagio that begins as if it is to be one of Beethoven’s most serene slow movements, but it turns out to be a mere eighteen bars long, leading straight into the finale – a brilliant combination of structural tension and sunny lyricism.

 

Nigel Simeone © 2011

BEETHOVEN Ludwig van, Clarinet Trio in B flat

The Trio in B flat Op.11 for clarinet, cello and piano is one of Beethoven’s least-serious works. By 1798 he had settled in Vienna and had become so successful as a composer that the majority of his works were being written in response to commissions. A couple of years later Beethoven admitted that he had been receiving more commissions than he could fulfil.

The scoring is very unusual and although Beethoven may not have divined the soul of the clarinet with the unerring instinct of Mozart, the alternative version that Beethoven made for violin – a shrewd piece of salesmanship – is less colourful.

The unison opening of the first movement is arresting and the approach to the second theme is also striking, recalling as it does a comparable passage in Haydn’s Symphony No.102, also in B flat. The Adagio highlights the cello in a reflective theme which is related to the minuet of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in G, Op.49 No.2 and indeed to the Septet of 1800.

In Beethoven’s hands the decidedly trivial could become a catalyst for the most imaginative art of transformation – the Diabelli Variations is perhaps the most extreme example – and for the finale of his Trio, Op.11, Beethoven took one of the popular tunes from a recent opera for his inspiration. In fact it is the only one of Beethoven’s major instrumental works to contain a set of variations on a theme by another composer. Joseph Weigl’s comic opera L’amor marinaro (“Love at sea”) was first performed at the Burgtheater in Vienna in October 1797, and the aria “Pria ch’io l’impegno” was an instant success. In addition to Beethoven, this frequently-hummed tune was also used by Joseph Eybler, Hummel and Paganini, who wrote an elaborate concert piece for violin and orchestra based on it.

Beethoven’s Op.11 acquired the nickname of Gassenhauer or “Street song” Trio as the result of his use of this theme, and the idea of using Weigl’s melody seems to have come from the clarinettist for whom Beethoven wrote the trio, Joseph Bähr. Although Beethoven considered writing another finale he never did so, presumably because he thought this finale too lightweight, but the nine variations are among the young Beethoven’s most inspired, witty and amusing. After the surprise of the opening variation being for piano solo, it stays silent in the second one, a duet for clarinet and cello. The fourth and seventh variations are in B flat minor – the latter’s dotted rhythms and blocks of chords reminiscent of a funeral march. After the last variation there is an amusing diversion from the home key of B flat to G major and to six-eight, the situation being saved and the original tempo regained just in the nick of time.

 

Jeremy Hayes © 2010

About the Artists

Ensemble 360 musicians

Ensemble 360

Ensemble 360 has gained an enviable reputation across the UK for the quality and integrity of their performances. Formed in 2005, eleven musicians of international standing came together to take up residency in South Yorkshire with Music in the Round, establishing a versatile group comprising five string players, five wind players and a pianist.  Get a glimpse of them in performance here.

The Ensemble 360 musicians share a passion for the music which radiates through each performance. Their enthusiasm, drive and musicality captivate audiences both through the quality of their playing and their engaging spoken introductions. Due to the flexible nature of the group’s line-up the repertoire possibilities are enormous; anything from baroque duos, through classical quartets to new commissions for all eleven players. 

 

VIENNESE MASTERWORKS: BRAHMS & MORE FOR SOLO PIANO

Tim Horton

Crucible Playhouse, Sheffield
Thursday 4 December 2025, 7.00pm

Tickets:
£23
£14 UC, PIP & DLA
£5 Students & Under 35s

Past Event
Home› What's on› VIENNESE MASTERWORKS: BRAHMS & MORE FOR SOLO PIANO

HAYDN Piano Sonata in E flat major Hob.XVI:52 (17’)
BRAHMS Four Ballades Op.10 (25’)
SCHOENBERG Suite Op.25 (15’)
BEETHOVEN Piano Sonata No.15 Op.28, ‘Pastoral’ (25’) 

Tim Horton returns to Sheffield for the latest in his popular series celebrating the long musical history of Vienna. Beethoven’s well-known Piano Sonata No.15, nicknamed the ‘Pastoral’, is showcased alongside Brahms’s emotional and romantic Four Ballades, which relate stories through poetic references. Written by one of the 20th century’s most important composers based in Vienna, Arnold Schoenberg, the Suite is a landmark collection of Baroque dances with a difference.

IN CONVERSATION with Tim Horton
Crucible Playhouse, 5.30pm – 6.15pm
Tickets: £5 / Free to all ticket holders for the evening concert, but please book in advance

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HAYDN Joseph, Piano Sonata in E flat

i. Allegro
ii. Adagio
iii. Finale. Presto
Composed in 1794, this is the last and most imposing of Haydn’s piano sonatas. Donald Francis Tovey (who devoted the first five pages of his essay on the work to an analysis of the first twelve bars) wrote that ‘neither Haydn nor Mozart succeeded in writing many mature pianoforte solo of such importance as this sonata’. Haydn wrote it in London for one of the capital’s finest pianists, Therese Jansen. He conceived on a grand scale, but was also daringly original – even by his own standards. from the thick, almost orchestral sound of the opening chords of the large sonata for first movement. The slow movement is in the remotest possible key – E major – and it is a rich, hymn-like piece which is derived almost entirely from the figure heard in its first bar. The finale begins with a series of repeated Gs from which the main theme stutters into life, and the harmonies return to the work’s home key of E flat – a brilliant shock tactic from Haydn who proceeds to transform the start of the main theme into the movement’s main accompaniment figure, and to drive towards an exciting close.

BRAHMS Johannes, Ballades

i. Andante, after the Scottish ballad ‘Edward’
ii. Andante, espressivo e dolce – Allegro non troppo
iii. Intermezzo. Allegro
iv. Andante con moto
Brahms composed this set of four Ballades in Düsseldorf in 1854 (when he was 20), at a time when Robert and Clara Schumann were promoting the young Brahms’s career. The poetic ballad on which the musical form was based involved a verse narrative with refrains. Chopin’s famous group of Ballades had been written between 1831 and 1842 and treated this idea very freely. As Charles Rosen has pointed out, Brahms was more faithful to the medieval origins of the poetic form, describing his approach as ‘more thoroughly neo-Gothic’. The four Ballades are in two pairs, linked by related keys. The first two are in D minor and D major, while the third and fourth are in B minor and B major. The first Ballade was directly inspired by an ancient Scottish ballad that had been published in German by the poet Johann Gottfried Herder. It is a gruesome tale of Edward’s sword dripping with the blood of his father and ending with him cursing his mother, though Brahms’s piece – although stormy and passionate in the middle section – does not really evoke the mood of the poem. Instead, there’s a sense of its formal qualities and its symmetry. The second Ballade begins slowly, but the main Allegro non troppo section is dramatic, dominated by an obsessive rhythm of four quavers that returns later to provide a kind of ghostly knocking. The third Ballade is headed ‘Intermezzo’ and it is a Scherzo-like piece in B minor, with a central Trio section that introduces an ethereal idea in F sharp major. The final Ballade begins as sweeping triple-time movement, but Brahms introduces a remarkable contrasting idea, with a marking worthy of late Beethoven: Più lento. Col intimissimo sentimento, ma senza troppo marcare la melodia (Slower. With most intimate feeling, but without heavily marking the melody)

SCHOENBERG Arnold, Suite for Piano

Composed between 1921 and 1923, Arnold Schoenberg’s Suite for Piano Op. 25 is the earliest work in which the composer deployed his 12-tone technique in every movement. Earlier compositions – the Five Pieces for Piano, Op. 23 (1920–23) and the Serenade, Op. 24 (1920-1923) – make use of tone rows only in a single movement. Rather than deploying traditional tonal relationships, the Suite is constructed of permutations of a sequence of all 12 chromatic pitches. The basic ‘tone row’ (order of the pitches) is: E–F–G–D♭–G♭–E♭–A♭–D–B–C–A–B♭. For the first time, Schoenberg employs transpositions and inversions of this tone row; beginning the row on a different pitch but following the same contour, and presenting the row as a mirror image (a step up of a tone becomes a step down of a tone, and so on). 

In other regards, however, the Suite is quite traditional. In form and style, it echos the Baroque Suite; an popular form for instrumental music in the 17th Century consisting of a series of dances. Schoenberg’s suite has six movements or dances: 

i. Präludium (or prelude) 
ii. Gavotte (characterized by a moderately quick quadruple meter, a distinctive upbeat, and often involving hopping or skipping steps) 
iii. Musette (a lively dance) 
iv. Intermezzo  
v. Menuett. Trio (a dance in triple time) 
vi. Gigue (a lively concluding movement) 

The suite was first performed by Schoenberg’s pupil Eduard Steuermann in Vienna on 25 February 1924.   

BEETHOVEN Ludwig van, Piano Sonata in D ‘Pastoral’

i. Allegro
ii. Andante
iii. Scherzo. Allegro vivace
iv. Rondo. Allegro ma non troppo
The so-called ‘Pastoral’ Sonata was composed in 1801, and the nickname is justified by the generally sunny mood of parts of the work, especially its finale. In fact it could hardly have been written at a more traumatic time in Beethoven’s life: this was the year in which he confessed to a few of his closest friends that he was losing his hearing. Published by the Bureau des Arts et d’Industrie in Vienna, it was described as a ‘Grande Sonate’ and dedicated to Joseph Freiherr von Sonnenfels (1732–1817), a friend of Mozart and a liberal thinker whose chief claim to fame was bringing about the abolition of torture in Austria in 1776. After a first movement that shows signs of real stress and tension in the turbulent development, the slow movement, in D minor, is restrained and rather despondent. The Scherzo is a startling contrast to this – playful in parts and also dramatic in the central Trio section. The last movement is a gentle and bucolic Rondo.

 

Nigel Simeone ©2014

About the Artists

Tim Horton

Tim Horton is one of the UK’s leading pianists, equally at home in solo and chamber repertoire. He has appeared as soloist with major orchestras including the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and Trondheim Symphony Orchestra.

Tim gave his debut solo recital at Wigmore Hall in 2016, and appears there frequently as both soloist and collaborative artist. He is regularly invited to play at distinguished festivals and series across the UK and abroad, including Music in the Round for whom he has presented a number of solo piano cycles, alongside his work with Ensemble 360.  During 2026 Tim presents the fifth and sixth instalments of his Chopin Cycle at London’s Wigmore Hall and embarks on a new Beethoven cycle for Music in the Round at the Crucible. Alongside his solo work Tim maintains a busy performing schedule with Ensemble 360 and the Leonore Piano Trio, and is a founding member of both groups. He is regularly broadcast by BBC Radio 3. Read more. 

MOZART GRAN PARTITA

Ensemble 360

Upper Chapel, Sheffield
Saturday 22 November 2025, 2.00pm

Tickets:
£23
£14 UC, PIP & DLA
£5 Students & Under 35s

Past Event
Ensemble 360 musicians
Home› What's on› MOZART GRAN PARTITA

Please be aware that balcony tickets for this concert offer a restricted view, and any words spoken by the artists will not be amplified by the microphone to the balcony area. If you would like further clarification about these seats, please contact the Music in the Round office at info@musicintheround.co.uk

ARRIEU Suite en quatre (10’)
GOUNOD Petite symphonie (20’)
MOZART Serenade No.10 K361 ‘Gran Partita’ (50’) 

Mozart’s Serenade No.10 – immortalised in the 1984 film Amadeus – is considered one of the composer’s greatest works, and is a masterpiece of wind writing. Nicknamed the ‘Gran Partita’ (or ‘big wind symphony’), it is breathtaking in its beauty.

Described by English music critic Noël Goodwin as “virtually an ‘operatic’ ensemble of passionate feeling and sensuous warmth”, the work’s emotional core is the third movement’s Adagio, a lyrical, intense melody that tugs at the heartstrings.

This is chamber music on a large scale, with an array of oboes, bassoons, horns, clarinets, basset horns and a double bass playing one of the undisputed highlights of classical music.

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ARRIEU Claude, Suite en quatre

i. Andante cantabile
ii. Scherzando
iii. Adagio
iv. Presto
 

Claude Arrieu was the pen name used by composer Louise-Marie Simon and was considered one of the most versatile French composers writing during the second half of the 20th century. Having trained at the Paris conservatoire, Arrieu became well known for both her operas and for her woodwind compositions, the latter giving her a freedom to explore playful and carefree character, whilst keeping the main elements of her neoclassical style. Imagery through rhythm and melodic lines are staples of her writing, expressed especially well through her Suite en quatre. Composed for Flute, Oboe, Clarinet and Bassoon, the first movement introduces the listener to each instrument through a solo theme that begins to interweave, before moving into a lively, mischievous section. The third movement contrasts the playfulness of the other three, being much more reflective and somber, yet still retaining the lilting nature present in the rest of the pieces. 

GOUNOD Charles, Petite symphonie

i. Adagio–Allegro 
ii. Andante cantabile (quasi adagio) attacca 
iii. Scherzo. Allegro moderato 
iv. Finale. Allegretto 
 

The Petite symphonie is the only nonet composed by Gounod, being better known for his operas and religious music. Written in 1885, it was commissioned by flautist Paul Taffenel, a renowned musician and professor at the Paris Conservatoire, who also happened to be a friend of Gounod’s. Woodwind instruments had recently been revolutionised thanks to Theobald Boehm, making them more structurally consistent and therefore more reliable as instruments. This led to the founding of a chamber music society by Taffenel to promote music for these improved instruments, sparking the creation of the Petite symphonie. The symphony is very typical of its kind, having four movements, and being greatly inspired by Mozart and Haydn’s wind pieces. Each movement contrasts in character and contains clear musical structures and flowing melodies that are characteristic of Gounod’s works. 

MOZART Wolfgang Amadeus, Serenade in B flat ‘Gran Partita’, K361

Harmoniemusik or wind band music was extremely popular in the last twenty-five years of the eighteenth century, a time when the Austrian Empire found it fashionable to keep a private wind band, called a Harmonie, and when Emperor Joseph II added a Harmonie to the royal court, the success of this kind of musical organisation was assured. The function of such ensembles was to provide music for social, not military occasions, and the bulk of the music they played were arrangements of popular songs, operas, symphonies and ballets, though there were original compositions too, for outdoor or indoor entertainment, more often than not of a divertimento or serenade-like character. Nearly all of Mozart’s music for wind band dates from this period, when there was a seemingly insatiable demand for such music in Vienna

Apart from the ever-popular Septet, Beethoven’s chamber music with wind scarcely approaches the grandeur and splendour of Mozart’s Serenade in C minor, K.388 or the Serenade in B flat, K.361, possibly the most influential work for wind instruments ever composed.

It has been suggested that this ‘Gran Partita’, as it is called on Mozart’s autograph manuscript – although this title was added at a later date and was probably nothing to do with Mozart – may have been his wedding present to his wife Constanza in 1782. If so, with Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll it must be one of the greatest gifts of music a composer has ever made to his wife. Anton Stadler, the player for whom Mozart wrote his Clarinet Concerto and Clarinet Quintet was one of the two clarinettists in Emperor Joseph’s Harmonie and in 1784 he organised a private concert for his own benefit, which included the first public performance of sections from the Serenade, K.361 which was described in the Wienerblättchen advertisement for the concert as a “great wind piece of a very special kind”.

“A master sat at every instrument – and oh, what an effect! – magnificent and grand. Mozart. That’s a life here, like the land of the blessed, the land of music…” wrote one critic who was present at the concert.

The Serenade in B flat is a seven-movement work scored for six pairs of wind instruments: oboes, clarinets, basset horns, bassoons, horns in F and horns in B flat. To this group of twelve players Mozart adds a string bass to double the second bassoon at the octave as well as having an independent part. For many years before Mozart’s autograph manuscript was consulted, this part was usually performed on a contrabassoon, giving rise to its other nickname, the Serenade for thirteen wind instruments. However, the autograph specifically identifies the instrument as “contrabasso” and the performance instructions “arco” and “pizzicato” also appear in the score.

In K.361 – and of course in the two other wind band serenades he wrote around the same time, those in E flat, K.375 and C minor, K.388 – Mozart shows that he has assimilated perfectly the language and mastered the problems of writing for wind band. This is particularly true of the brooding slow movements of K.361, with their undulating inner lines showing an extraordinary sense of what groups of wind instruments can create in the way of smooth, legato sound. Indeed, this work displays an almost luxuriant character which is missing in K.388 and very much refined in K.375.

The opening movement of K.361 begins with an extensive slow introduction which leads to a festive Molto allegro, typically serenade-like in character. The following minuet has two contrasting trio sections and the Adagio third movement, in E flat major, is an operatic ensemble of passionate feeling and sensuous warmth.

The fourth movement is a second minuet and once again it has two trio sections, after which the Romanze returns to the same key and slow tempo of the third movement, but with a contrasting Allegretto central section in C minor. The sixth movement is a set of six variations on an Allegretto theme in B flat major, and Mozart rounds off this extraordinary work with a high-spirited rondo.

 

© Jeremy Hayes 2010

About the Artists

Ensemble 360 musicians

Ensemble 360

Ensemble 360 has gained an enviable reputation across the UK for the quality and integrity of their performances. Formed in 2005, eleven musicians of international standing came together to take up residency in South Yorkshire with Music in the Round, establishing a versatile group comprising five string players, five wind players and a pianist.  Get a glimpse of them in performance here.

The Ensemble 360 musicians share a passion for the music which radiates through each performance. Their enthusiasm, drive and musicality captivate audiences both through the quality of their playing and their engaging spoken introductions. Due to the flexible nature of the group’s line-up the repertoire possibilities are enormous; anything from baroque duos, through classical quartets to new commissions for all eleven players. 

 

DEATH & THE MAIDEN

Dudok Quartet

Upper Chapel, Sheffield
Thursday 20 November 2025, 7.00pm

Tickets:
£23
£14 UC, PIP & DLA
£5 Students & Under 35s

Past Event
Home› What's on› DEATH & THE MAIDEN

Please be aware that balcony tickets for this concert offer a restricted view, and any words spoken by the artists will not be amplified by the microphone to the balcony area. If you would like further clarification about these seats, please contact the Music in the Round office at info@musicintheround.co.uk

SAARIAHO Terra Memoria (18’)
GESUALDO Moro, lasso, al mio duolo (4’)
MUSSORGSKY Songs and Dances of Death (selection) (10’)
LISZT Via Crucis (selection) (10’)
SCHUBERT String Quartet No.14 in D minor, ‘Death & the Maiden’ (35’) 

Described as “quite simply revelatory” (The Irish Times) and “stylish, open-minded and adventurous” (The Guardian), the Dudok Quartet Amsterdam has made its name as playful, inventive interpreters of the string quartet repertoire. Coached by Peter Cropper (first violin of the Lindsay String Quartet and founder of Music in the Round) in the early years of their collaboration, they have since gone from strength to strength. Presenting Schubert’s extraordinary and profound ‘Death and the Maiden’ String Quartet alongside their own arrangement of a 17th century Italian madrigal by Carlo Gesualdo and Kaija Saariaho’s modern masterpiece, Terra Memoria (‘Earth Memory’), this concert promises to thrill, intrigue and delight.

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SAARIAHO Kaija, Terra Memoria

“I feel when writing for a string quartet that I’m entering into the intimate core of musical communication,” the late Kaija Saariaho wrote of her second string quartet, Terra Memoria, in 2006. Twenty years separated her first and second outings for these forces, and while the electronics have departed in the journey from the initial Nymphéa to here (and the acute focus on timbre has relaxed), the pieces share a common musical argument. For one, there’s Saariaho’s continued fascination with the particular timbres and textures available to stringed instruments, like tremolandos, trills, and bowing techniques like playing at the bridge. What the two quartets also share is the sense of the music gleaming, resulting from these carefully chosen combinations. 

 

Terra Memoria is a pretty straightforward title. “Earth refers to my material, and memory to the way I’m working on it,” Saariaho wrote. “The piece is dedicated “for those departed,” she continued. “Those of us who are left behind are constantly reminded of our experiences together: our feelings continue to change about different aspects of their personality, certain memories keep on haunting us in our dreams. Even after many years, some of these memories change, some remain clear flashes which we can relive.” 

 

Saariaho died from brain cancer in 2023, so the piece becomes a kind of meta memorial today. But Terra Memoria is no redolent, misty-eyed tribute. Score indications vacillate frequently and distinctly, between misterioso, espressivo, and dolce (sweetly), followed by rasping sections called things like con violenza, impetuoso. The piece aches like a piece written a century before, full of expressive anguish and volatility. Listen for the waterfall-like constructions of limpid textures, and the stunning moment halfway through when the tiny, sky-high texture is delicately snuffed out.  

 

© Hugh Morris 2025

GESUALDO Carlo, Moro, lasso, al mio duolo

The name of Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, first spread across Italy because of a grand scandal. In 1590, after discovering his wife and her lover in flagrante, Gesualdo killed them both on the spot. Given all of the actors in this honour killing were drawn from nobility, news of the murder travelled particularly quickly; only later did his idiosyncratic corpus of strange harmonies emerge. 

 

Moro, lasso, al mio duolo, a morose yet sparkily inventive madrigal for five voices, comes from Gesualdo’s sixth and most stylistically adventurous book of madrigals, published in 1611, two years before his death aged 47. Gesualdo’s late madrigals are notable for their harmonic ingenuity. They are heavily chromatic, emotionally volatile, and utilise false relations—chromatic contradictions, where two voices overlap by a semitone at the same time to create a particularly scrunchy moment—frequently. The effect is polarising. Eminent 18th century music historian Charles Burney described the opening of Moro, lasso as “extremely shocking and disgusting.” But, over 400 years since Gesualdo’s death, it still sounds strikingly unlike anything else in the musical canon. 

 

© Hugh Morris 2025

MUSSORGSKY Modest, Songs and Dances of Death

Like Pictures at an Exhibition and his opera Khovanshchina, Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death number among the many works that required finishing or orchestrating by his composer friends. Today, they exist in many orchestrated versions, even serving as a jump-off point for Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Symphony, but the first version to exist was completed by Alexander Glazunov and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, published in 1882, a year after Mussorgsky’s death. 

Each of the four songs—Lullaby, Serenade, Trepak, and Field Marshal—are a poetic snapshot of a specific death; respectively, of a child, a girl, a drunken peasant, and a soldier. Mussorgsky set texts by Arseniy Golenishchev-Kutuzov, a younger friend of the composer, who lodged with Mussorgsky in the mid 1870s. 

In some ways the collection is a tale of Mussorgsky’s domestic situation, setting words by one housemate, and later having it orchestrated by another, in Rimsky-Korsakov. It also tells of Mussorgsky’s preoccupations. Death was firmly on his mind, having experienced the loss of friends—the death of painter Victor Hartmann inspired him to write Pictures at an Exhibition—as well as suffering from frequent alcohol-induced health problems himself.  

This cycle is certainly shadowed by death, but it’s interesting to note how death becomes an inevitable, inescapable fact, and in that way, a figure approaching the benign. (In this way, it bears a resemblance to Schubert’s calm, consoling figure who appears in the second stanza of Death and the Maiden.) In the first setting, Death appears at the door of a mother, then as a mysteriously seductive knight in the second, an enticing figure to a drunken figure in the third, and finally, the inevitable consequence of battle. 

 

© Hugh Morris 2025

LISZT Franz, Via Crucis

One of the great surprises of 19th century musical history was the about turn of Franz Liszt, the flamboyant pianist and supporter of radical progressive motion in music, who later took minor orders at the Vatican in 1865, and closed out his life as Abbé Liszt. However, Liszt approached church music with the much the same spirit that he sought the music of the future among the members of Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein in his earlier years; writing in 1835 in De la musique religieuse, Liszt sought a “regeneration” of religious music, and saw the composer’s social role extending into the church as well as secular musical contexts. 

Though there is a continuation of spirit, this is a Liszt unlike the fireworks of the B Minor sonata, the symphonic poems or the piano concerti. Via Crucis is a collaged work of musical pictures corresponding to the stations of the cross found in many Catholic churches. He finds a passionate if contained expressivity in this collection, which draws on plainchant and Bach’s Passion settings. 

 

© Hugh Morris 2025

SCHUBERT Franz, String Quartet in D minor ‘Death and the Maiden’

i. Allegro
ii. Andante
iii. Scherzo
iv. Presto
The beginning of 1824 was a very difficult period for an ill, penniless and depressed Franz Schubert. “I find myself to be the most unhappy and wretched creature in the world,” he wrote to his friend Josef Kupelwieser. “I might as well sing every day now, for upon retiring to bed each night I hope that I may not wake again, and each morning only recalls yesterday’s grief.” 

But he succeeded in channeling this moroseness into creation, and Schubert produced some of his most celebrated contributions to chamber music literature during this sorrow-filled period. Not only did he produce the String Quartet in A Minor D804, he returned—perhaps driven by his own reckoning with mortality—to his 1817 setting of Matthias Clodius’s Death and the Maiden, a two-stanza text which opens with the maiden’s frightened plea and closes with Death’s calm response. 

This music forms the basis of the second movement, a theme which spins out in variations before turning towards its somber home. It follows an explosive first movement which introduces the composition’s underlying principles: a throbbing, unrelenting triplet figure, and a hewing towards minor tonalities. This is a work that plumbs the depths of despair. 

The triplet theme returns as an accompaniment to the first violin’s descant in the first variation of the second movement. Then, two dances of death: A fast, jolting Scherzo, with a rare glimpse of the major mode sets up a galloping tarantella-rondo finale. It ends, completely spent, with two huge chords. 

 

© Hugh Morris 2025

About the Artists

Dudok Quartet

The Dudok Quartet (Amsterdam) has forged a reputation as one of the most creative and versatile quartets of its generation. With its ethos of ‘sharing the heart of music’, the quartet believes that chamber music is an act of friendship and play to be shared directly with audiences, and is committed to crafting unique and eclectic programmes that engage listeners in imaginative ways. Read more.

SOUNDS OF NOW: KONNAKOL, DRUM KIT & CODE

BC Manjunath, Alex McLean & Matt Davies

Crucible Playhouse, Sheffield
Saturday 8 November 2025, 8.00pm

Tickets:
£17
£10 UC, PIP & DLA
£5 Students & Under 35s

Past Event
Home› What's on› SOUNDS OF NOW: KONNAKOL, DRUM KIT & CODE

A newly-composed work for Konnakol (vocal percussive music from the South Indian Carnatic tradition), live-coded electronic music and percussion. Common to these disparate traditions is an interest in pattern, texture and complex rhythm, which mridangam and konnakol artist BC Manjunath, live-coder Alex McLean and drummer Matt Davies will explore through a unique and virtuosic live performance.

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About the Artists

BC Manjunath

B.C. Manjunath is one of India’s leading Mridangam artists, Konnakol exponent, composer and educator. He has performed extensively across the globe, collaborating with musicians, dancers and ensembles from diverse traditions. His work spans traditional Carnatic concerts to contemporary productions, bridging Indian rhythm with world music and new compositional frameworks.

Alex McLean live coding at a music event

Alex McLean

Alex McLean is a musician and independent, UKRI-funded researcher working on pattern-based music, textiles and dance. He has pushed forward the ‘live coding’ approach to algorithmic music over the past two decades, including co-creating the popular live coding environments Strudel and TidalCycles, and the worldwide Algorave movement for algorithmic dance music. He is based in Sheffield where he collaborates on Sheffield Pattern Club and the Alpaca festival of algorithmic patterns.

Matt Davies

Matt Davies is a forward thinking drummer/percussionist who puts aesthetic at the centre of his practice. His drumming draws influence from a multitude of different sources (namely minimalism, hiphop, jazz, South Indian Carnatic music and Senegalese Sabar music) which are unified by a unique approach to sound. This distinctive aesthetic can be heard in the collaborative work with Church Andrews and Kourosh Kanani.

PIANO CLASSICS

Libby Burgess

Crucible Playhouse, Sheffield
Saturday 8 November 2025, 2.00pm

Tickets:
£23
£14 UC, PIP & DLA
£5 Students & Under 35s

Past Event
Home› What's on› PIANO CLASSICS

SCHUBERT (arr. Liszt) Standchen (6’)
JS BACH (arr. Bauer) Die Seele ruht in Jesu Handen (6’)
LISZT Liebeslied (after Schumann’s ‘Widmung’) (4’)
SCHUBERT Four Impromptus (28′)
RACHMANINOV Prelude in D Op.23 (5’)
RACHMANINOV Moments Musicaux in B minor Op.16 No.3 (4’)
RACHMANINOV Prelude in G sharp minor Op.32 No.12 (3’)
RACHMANINOV Elegie (from ‘Morceaux de Fantaisie’) Op.3 No.1 (5’)
RACHMANINOV Prelude in G Op.32 No.5 (3’)
BINGEN (arr. Marie-Luise Hinrichs) O frondens virga (2’)
C SCHUMANN Notturno Op.6 No.2 (5’)
PUCCINI Piccolo valzer (3’)
S COLERIDGE-TAYLOR Deep River (6’)
BONDS Troubled Water (5’) 

Praised for her “warm, sensitive pianism” (The Observer), and for performances that are “a masterclass in the art of holding an audience’s attention” (Cherwell), Libby Burgess returns to Sheffield for a recital of some of the best-loved music for solo piano. From the dazzling inventiveness of Schubert’s Four Impromptus to the lush romanticism of Rachmaninov’s Morceaux de Fantaisie, this concert showcases some of the finest writing for the instrument.

This concert is dedicated to Julia Wilton, a Friend and generous supporter of Music in the Round for many years

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Piano Classics

Franz Schubert’s ‘Ständchen’ (‘A serenade’) was originally a lied for solo voice and piano. Composed in 1826, it is a setting of the ‘song’ in Act 2, Scene 3 of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. Evoking the coming of morning, the song begins: “Hark, hark, the lark at heaven’s gate sings, / and Phoebus ‘gins arise, / His steeds to water at those springs / on chalic’d flowers that lies”. Franz Liszt arranged Schubert’s ‘Ständchen’ for solo piano in 1838, including it as “Ständchen von Shakespeare” in his 12 Lieder von Franz Schubert. 

Another arrangement of vocal music, J. S. Bach’s ‘Die Seele ruht in Jesu Händen’ (‘The soul rests in Jesus’ hands’) was originally composed as an aria for his Cantata BWV 127. Written for a service on Estomihi (the Sunday before Lent), it is performed here in a transcription by the distinguished English-born American pianist and teacher, Harold Bauer.   

Liszt’s arrangement of Robert Schuman’s ‘Widmung’ (‘dedication’) for his ‘Liebeslied’ (or ‘Love Song’) preserves the lyrical emotion of the original while adding his own pianistic virtuosity. Gifted to his fiancé Clara as a wedding present, Schuman’s song is expanded and transformed; whereas Schuman’s ‘Widmung’ ends quietly, Liszt’s ‘Liebeslied’ finishes with a final pianistic flurry.  

Schubert wrote eight Impromptus, published in two sets of four – the first set (op. 90) was published during the composer’s lifetime, the second was published posthumously as Op. 142. Composed in 1827, the Four Impromptus Op. 90 D. 899 are a cornerstone of the piano repertoire. The first, in C minor, blends elements of sonata, variation, and through-composed structures. The second Impromptu in E♭ major is a swift ‘moto perpetuo’ with a ternary (or ABA) form. The third is a flowing and meditative piece in G♭ major, characterized by long melodic lines, while the fourth and final Impromptu, in A♭ major, is characterized by cascading arpeggios and a chordal response. 

Like Liszt, Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninov was a virtuoso pianist as well as a composer. Widely considered one of the finest pianists of his day, Rachmaninov’s pianistic talents can be heard in his writing for the instrument. The Ten Preludes, Op. 23, composed in 1901 and 1903, is part of a full suite of 24 preludes in all the major and minor keys. The Prelude in D Major is No. 4 in the collection. Marked andante cantabile (moderate and flowing with a lyrical quality), the short composition is in ternary form with an opening theme, developed in a middle section, returning at the end. Also performed is the Prelude in G Sharp minor Op.32 No.12. Among the composer’s most atmospheric pieces for piano, opening right-hand arpeggios fall across a distinctly Russian melody. The Prelude in G Major Op.32 No.5 is the most famous of the set, with its march-like outer sections contrasted by a more lyrical middle section. Rachmaninov himself had huge hands – stretching a 13th (an octave plus a 6th, or from middle C to a high A) – so would have had no difficulty bringing out the melody in the inner voice of the middle section.  

Rachmaninov’s set of Six moments musicaux were composed when he was just 23 years old. Keen to demonstrate his mastery of musical forms, as well as his virtuosity as a pianist, the third movement (in B minor) is the emotional heart of the set with a brooding melody played low on the piano, under wide, open chords. The 5 Morceaux de fantaisie (or ‘fantasy pieces’) were composed when Rachmaninov was younger still (aged 19) in 1892 and are dedicated to Anton Arensky, Rachmaninov’s harmony teacher at the Moscow Conservatory. The opening Elegy consists of gentle arpeggios and a deeply melancholic melody. 

Hildegard von Bingen was a 12th-century abbess and polymath, active as a composer, writer, and mystic. Her piece ‘O frondens virga’ (‘O blossoming branch’) was composed as a psalm antiphon for the Virgin Mary. It is performed here in an arrangement by the pianist, Marie-Luise Hinrichs.  

Giacomo Puccini’s ‘Piccolo Valzer’ (‘Little Waltz’) was published in 1894. The inspiration for the work was said to be the rocking of a boat on Lake Massaciuccoli, where Puccini loved to go fishing. It was subsequently re-elaborated by the composer and became one of the best-known opera arias, Musetta’s solo ‘Quando me n’vo’ in La Bohème. 

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s ‘Deep River’ was written in 1904 as part of the composer’s 24 Negro Spirituals. Coleridge-Taylor is reported to have said of the collection: “what Brahms has done for the Hungarian folk music, Dvorak for the Bohemian, and Grieg for the Norwegian, I have tried to do for these Negro Melodies”. 

Margaret Bonds arranged over fifty African-American spirituals for various instruments. The piano work ‘Troubled Water’ is based on the spiritual ‘Wade in the Water’ which was associated with Songs of the Underground Railroad, work songs used by slaves in the nineteenth century to share coded information for escape. Beginning with energetic, syncopated rhythms in the left hand, leading into the recognizable theme in the spiritual, the piece then thickens, with Bonds weaving in jazz-inspired sonorities. 

SONGS OF LOVE

Claire Booth & Ensemble 360

Crucible Playhouse, Sheffield
Friday 7 November 2025, 7.00pm

Tickets:
£23
£14 UC, PIP & DLA
£5 Students & Under 35s

Past Event
Photo of singer Claire Booth, soprano
Home› What's on› SONGS OF LOVE

Programme includes
DVOŘÁK (arr. Matthews) Love Songs (18’)
DEBUSSY Trois poèmes de Stéphane Malllarmé (13’)
MUSSORGSKY The Nursery (selection) (10’)
DEBUSSY String Quartet (25’) 

Claire Booth is a singer celebrated around the world for her distinctive and characterful voice and the relentless curiosity in the range of work she presents. In recent years she has become a frequent collaborator with Ensemble 360, including a much-lauded CD release Pierrot Portraits. As they prepare for Sheffield Chamber Music Festival 2026, of which Claire is Guest Curator, they present a dazzling evening of French chamber music.

In 1913 Debussy and Ravel began a somewhat friendly rivalry to set three poems by Stéphane Mallarmé, whose words, like the music of these great French composers, explored the same shimmering textures beloved of their contemporary impressionist painters. Ravel’s Chansons madécasses – one of the most popular works in SCMF 2024 – opens this sensuous celebration of light and love which concludes with Debussy’s glittering string quartet.

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DVORAK Antonín, (arr. Matthews) Love Songs

i. Oh, that longed-for happiness does not bloom for our love (Ó naší lásce nekvete to vytoužené štěstí)
ii. So many a heart is as though dead (V tak mnohém srdci mrtvo jest)
iii. Around the house now I stagger (Kol domu se teď potácím) 
iv. I know that in sweet hope (Já vím, že v sladké naději) 
v. Over the countryside reigns a light sleep (Nad krajem vévodí lehký spánek) 
vi. Here in the forest by a brook (Zde v lese u potoka) 
vii. In that sweet power of your eyes (V té sladké moci očí tvých) 
viii. Oh dear soul, the only one (Ó duše drahá jedinká) 

 

Dvorak’s Love Songs are a reworking of his earlier collection Cypresses. The Cypresses were first written in 1865, but Dvorak revisited them again in 1889 to create 8 new songs out of the original 18.  Inspired by the traditional music of his native country, the works are settings of romantic poems by Gustav Pfleger-Moravsky, a fellow Czech who’s work Dvorak admired. The songs were rewritten in many forms by the composer, including a reworking for string quartet, and he pulled many of the main themes out of the song cycle for other works. Although originally written for piano and voice, this arrangement has the vocal line accompanied by violin, viola, cello and double bass. Love Songs are distinctive and known for their elaborate accompaniments and are argued to be the best example of his writing for solo voice. 

DEBUSSY Claude, Trois Poemes de Mallarmé

i. Soupir  
ii. Placet futile 
iii. Eventail 
 

Paris in the late-19th century was a hub of creative innovation. The poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) was a central figure in this experimental scene. At his weekly meetings on Tuesdays at his apartment on the Rue de Rome, Mallarmé held court, speaking for hours about art and politics. Regular attendees included W.B. Yeats, Oscar Wilde, Édouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Emile Zola, Paul Gauguin, Edgar Degas, Paul Verlaine, Rainer Maria Rilke… and Claude Debussy.  

Debussy adored poetry, particularly the works of Mallarmé. Indeed, his most-famous composition, the orchestral tone poem Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, is closely based on Mallarmé’s poem (‘The Afternoon of the Faune’). Debussy’s music evokes the languid feeling of the poem, while the work’s structure closely mirrors that of the text: Debussy’s composition has the same number of bars (110) as the poem has lines. 

This reverence for poetry can be seen in Debussy’s setting of three poems by Mallarmé, composed late in the composer’s life in 1913. In her analysis of the first of the three songs – ‘Soupir’ (Sigh) – musicologist Marianne Wheeldon notes that “Debussy’s setting tries to imitate the permutability of Mallarmé’s syntax”. Debussy closely mirrors the poem’s sophisticated form, adapting his music to the text (rather than attempting to make the poem fit a traditional musical structure) so that the poem’s ambiguity is preserved. Just as Mallarmé’s poem is written as a single breathless sentence – “Faithful, a white jet of water sighs toward the Azure / – Toward the tender Azure of pale and pure October” – Debussy imitates the freely flowing and associative form of Mallarmé’s poem in which the poet’s ‘soul’ reaches toward ‘autumn’, ‘freckles’, ‘the sky’, and so on.  

Debussy was not the only composer to set poems by Mallarmé. Famously, Maurice Ravel also composed his own Trois poèmes de Mallarmé. Indeed, it was Ravel who first secured the rights to set Mallarmé’s poetry to music. Both Debussy and Ravel set ‘Soupir’ and ‘Placet futile’, however whereas Ravel chose to end his collection with ‘Surgi de la croupe et du bond’ (‘ Risen from the crupper and leap’), Debussy finishes with ‘Eventail’ (‘Fan’), a setting of Mallarmé’s poem ‘Autre Éventail de Mademoiselle Mallarmé’.  Subtly erotic, the poem begins: 

O dreamer, so that I
May plunge in that pathless thing,
Pure delight, by a subtle lie
Learn to hold in your hand my wing. 

MUSSORGSKY Modest, The Nursery (selection)

Originally published in two series, The Nursey song cycle was written between 1868 and 1872. Made up of seven songs, Mussorgsky wrote both the music and the words. The text is written musically exactly as it would be spoken, which leads to some unexpected melodies, and a fluid rhythm in an irregular time signature. Mussorgsky was one of the first composers to make music from speech patterns in this way. The style of each song is varied, but Mussorgsky’s appreciation for humour is clear. Although written to express the feelings and ideas of a child, the music is not for children, as it is as advanced as any other work from that era, and offers a fresh but haunting insight into domestic life. 

DEBUSSY Claude, String Quartet in G minor Op. 10

Debussy’s String Quartet was first performed at the Société Nationale de Musique on 29 December 1893 – almost exactly a year before he shocked Paris with the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, the most laconic manifestation of his revolutionary creative spirit. The Quartet, composed just after the Prélude, is one of his earliest mature works – a piece that still has some roots in the musical language of César Franck but in which a fresh and brilliant imagination can be heard, not just in the free handling of forms, but also in the spectacularly inventive writing for string instruments – something absorbed by Ravel in the Quartet he wrote a decade later. The first movement is robust and confident, while the second, with its extensive use of pizzicato, hints at the Javanese music that Debussy heard at the 1889 Exposition. The slow movement begins with fragments of the theme split between the lower instruments before being introduced in full by the first violin, over rich chromatic harmonies. The finale has clear thematic links with the first. It starts hesitantly, gradually building up both tension and speed, on a melodic idea that is presented in different guises before reaching the dazzling conclusion in G major. 

Nigel Simeone © 2011 

About the Artists

Claire Booth

“An actor-singer who can raise the dramatic heat as soon as she enters the stage” (Opera Now), “that most questing, resourceful and intelligent of sopranos” (Daily Telegraph), British soprano Claire Booth has been widely acclaimed for her “radiant, rapturous, wonderfully nuanced performances” and voice of “piercing purity [and] luscious richness” (The Scotsman). She is renowned for her breadth of repertoire, and for the vitality and musicianship that she brings to the operatic stage and concert platform, with a versatility that encompasses repertoire spanning from Monteverdi and Handel, through Rossini, Berg and Britten, to a fearless commitment to the music of the present day. Booth has won the 2025 RPS Singer Award with the jury celebrating an artistry that “knows no bounds.” Read more.

Ensemble 360 musicians

Ensemble 360

Ensemble 360 has gained an enviable reputation across the UK for the quality and integrity of their performances. Formed in 2005, eleven musicians of international standing came together to take up residency in South Yorkshire with Music in the Round, establishing a versatile group comprising five string players, five wind players and a pianist.  Get a glimpse of them in performance here.

The Ensemble 360 musicians share a passion for the music which radiates through each performance. Their enthusiasm, drive and musicality captivate audiences both through the quality of their playing and their engaging spoken introductions. Due to the flexible nature of the group’s line-up the repertoire possibilities are enormous; anything from baroque duos, through classical quartets to new commissions for all eleven players. 

 

RAVEL & GLASS: CINEMATIC QUARTETS

Piatti Quartet

Crucible Playhouse, Sheffield
Thursday 6 November 2025, 7.00pm

Tickets:
£23
£14 UC, PIP & DLA
£5 Students & Under 35s

Past Event
Home› What's on› RAVEL & GLASS: CINEMATIC QUARTETS

HERMAN (arr. Birchall) Suite from ‘Psycho’ (10’) 
GREENWOOD Prospector’s Quartet from ‘There Will Be Blood’ (3’)
GLASS String Quartet No.3 (18’)
RAVEL String Quartet in F (30’)

Ravel’s glorious, rhapsodic Quartet is the joyous conclusion of this concert of string music composed for, and used in, cinema. From Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood’s spare and spectral score for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Oscar-winning ‘There Will Be Blood’, to Bernard Herman’s iconic music composed for Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’, and Philip Glass’s String Quartet No.3 (composed for the 1985 film ‘Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters’), the Piatti Quartet showcases the captivating range of chamber music composed for the big screen.

The Piatti Quartet have been described by composer Julian Anderson as “living treasures of chamber music… meticulous attention to detail is combined with strong expressive impulse and a wonderful sense of musical drama”, and return to the Playhouse after several rapturously received concerts across their stellar career.

FILM SCREENINGS
A specially curated series of film screenings inspired by the Piatti’s ‘Cinematic Quartets’ takes place at The Showroom to coincide with their concert.

Wednesday 5 November, The Showroom
5.15pm Music in Films panel discussion
6.00pm ‘Mishima’

A panel discussion, including violinist Emily Holland from the Piatti Quartet, will delve into the ways music brings film to life.
Find more details about the panel discussion here: showroomcinema.org.uk

Sunday 9 November, The Showroom
2.30pm ‘There Will Be Blood’

 

HERRMANN Bernard, (arr. Birchall), Suite from ‘Psycho’

‘Psycho’ can easily be said to have one of the most iconic scores in film history– even if you haven’t seen the film, you will have heard the screeching strings from the shower-murder scene. Herrmann scored 7 films for director Alfred Hitchcock in total, with Psycho being the 6th in their collaboration, and wrote the music for other epics such as Citizen Kane, The Twilight Zone and The War of the Worlds. The score for Psycho was written only for the string section of an orchestra, with the strings being muted throughout the film (apart from in the iconic scene) which was to aid in the film’s stark, dissonant, claustrophobic feeling. The music contains influences from composers like Bartok, Debussy and Stravinski, and is extremely effective in conveying the thing Herrmann most wanted it to: “terror”. 

GREENWOOD Jonny, Prospector’s Quartet from ‘There Will Be Blood’

As well as being lead guitarist of the rock band Radiohead, Jonny Greenwood has forged a hugely successful career as a composer of film scores. Credits include soundtracks for the films The Power of the Dog (2021, directed by Jane Campion) and We Need to Talk about Kevin (2011) as well as numerous films in collaboration with the director Paul Thomas Anderson – 2018’s Phantom Thread (for which Greenwood was nominated for an Academy Award) and 2007’s There Will Be Blood, from which this quartet is taken. 

As a child, Greenwood played both the recorder (an instrument he would continue to play into adulthood) and viola. It is his affinity for string writing, and his knowledge of both rock and classical traditions, that sets him aside a film composer. The score for There Will Be Blood, for example, features quotations from the works of Arvo Pärt and Johannes Brahms (as well as some of Greenwood’s own previous compositions) and is characterised by Greenwood’s signature lush string-textures. IndieWire called the soundtrack “One of the most memorable scores this side of the year 2000”, while Variety noted the evocative nature of the music: “Jonny Greenwood’s musical compositions almost become another character in the film. Think Bernard Herrmann and Taxi Driver, another portrait of a twisted soul, with sound effects and music to match”.  

Indeed, this is music that conjures the darkly unsettling world of Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!, on which the film is based. In ‘The Prospector’s Quartet’, repeated notes played on the cello seem to evoke the machinery of oil extraction, while churning melodies in the strings grow in their foreboding intensity. Daniel Day-Lewis won an Oscar for his performance in the film. As IndieWire noted, “Greenwood’s work, which is string-heavy and beautifully unsettling, is as memorable as Day-Lewis’ performance … Close your eyes and you can almost feel the oil pulsing beneath the ground”.  

 

GLASS Philip, String Quartet No.3 ‘Mishima’

Philip Glass has a musical language that is instantly palatable, with its flowing arpeggios and lush instrumentation. It’s also confined to a very narrow strip in the spectrum of musical expression, yet the potential for infinite subtlety reveals itself quickly. The idea is reminiscent of Pablo Picasso’s blue period, during which he only uses shades of blue and green to convey incredibly nuanced ideas and emotions. In Glass’ third string quartet, the harmony revolves closely around D minor in the first four movements, and E flat major in the last two. The development of the piece is constructed through subtle changes in the layering of material, rather than through traditional thematic development. Originally, these six movements were written as a soundtrack to the film “Mishima”, directed by Paul Schrader. It tells the story of the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, who was an active nationalist who ended up taking his own life through the act of Seppuku, a ritual suicide, after having led a failed coup d’état.

 

Johannes Marmen 2016

RAVEL Maurice, String Quartet in F

i. Allegro moderato. très doux

ii. Assez vif. très rythmé

iii. Très lent Vif et agité

 

The first two movements of Ravel’s Quartet were finished in December 1902 and the next month he submitted the first movement for a prize at the Paris Conservatoire, where he was still a student. The jury was unimpressed and the Director Théodore Dubois was typically acidic, claiming that it “lacked simplicity”. The failure to win a prize meant that Ravel’s studies with Fauré were over but Ravel persisted with the Quartet, and by April 1903 he had finished all four movements. He put it aside for yet another doomed attempt at the Prix de Rome, but it’s likely that he made further revisions later in the year. The pianist and composer Alfredo Casella recalled running into Ravel in the street in January 1904: “I found [Ravel] seated on a bench, attentively reading a manuscript. I asked him what it was. He said: It is a quartet I have just finished. I am rather pleased with it.” The first performance was given at the Schola Cantorum by the Heymann Quartet, on 5 March 1904. It is dedicated “à mon cher maître Gabriel Fauré”.

 

In a parallel with Debussy’s Quartet, Ravel makes use of cyclic themes – material heard in the first movement returns in various guises throughout. The second movement is notable for Ravel’s brilliant use of cross-rhythms as all four string players become a kind of gigantic guitar. The rhapsodic slow movement includes a dream-like recollection of the cyclic theme. In the finale, Ravel’s use of irregular time signatures generates a momentum that is not only impossible to predict but impossible to resist. Recollections of the cyclic theme are woven into the texture with great subtlety and the kaleidoscopic string writing produces a conclusion that glitters and surges.

 

Nigel Simeone © 2012

MESSIAEN ROUNDTABLE

Ensemble 360 & Christopher Dingle

Crucible Playhouse, Sheffield
Saturday 1 November 2025, 4.00pm

Tickets:
£5
Free to ticket-holders for the evening concert, but please book in advance

Past Event
Ensemble 360 string musicians in performance
Home› What's on› MESSIAEN ROUNDTABLE

Leading Messiaen scholar Christopher Dingle (Professor of Music at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire) joins musicians from Ensemble 360 for this roundtable discussion exploring one of the great masterpieces of the twentieth century: Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time.

About the Artists

Ensemble 360 musicians

Ensemble 360

Ensemble 360 has gained an enviable reputation across the UK for the quality and integrity of their performances. Formed in 2005, eleven musicians of international standing came together to take up residency in South Yorkshire with Music in the Round, establishing a versatile group comprising five string players, five wind players and a pianist.  Get a glimpse of them in performance here.

The Ensemble 360 musicians share a passion for the music which radiates through each performance. Their enthusiasm, drive and musicality captivate audiences both through the quality of their playing and their engaging spoken introductions. Due to the flexible nature of the group’s line-up the repertoire possibilities are enormous; anything from baroque duos, through classical quartets to new commissions for all eleven players. 

 

Christopher Dingle

Christopher Dingle is Professor of Music and Director of the French Music Research Hub at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. His realization of Messiaen’s Un oiseau des arbres de Vie (Oiseau Tui) was premiered at the 2015 BBC Proms and he is author/editor of five books on the composer. Read more.

QUARTET FOR THE END OF TIME

Ensemble 360

Crucible Playhouse, Sheffield
Saturday 1 November 2025, 7.00pm

Tickets:
£23
£14 UC, PIP & DLA
£5 Students & Under 35s

Past Event
Ensemble 360 string musicians in performance
Home› What's on› QUARTET FOR THE END OF TIME

KLEIN String Trio (12’)
SMIT Trio for Clarinet, Viola and Piano (12’)
MESSIAEN Quartet for the End of Time (50’)  

Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time is the centrepiece of this concert showcasing music to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War and the liberation of the internment, concentration and death camps of Europe. Considered one of the 20th century’s greatest works, Messiaen composed the Quartet while a prisoner of war in the Stalag VIII-A camp. As Steven Osborne writes, “the music seems to touch the far edges of human experience”. Also featured in the programme is Gideon Klien’s folk-infused String Trio, composed just ten days before Klien was transported from Terezín to Auschwitz, and Leo Smit’s lyrical and profoundly expressive Trio for Clarinet, Viola and Piano. 

Messiaen Roundtable
Crucible Playhouse, 4.00pm
Tickets £5 / Free to all ticket holders for the evening concert,
but please book here in advance

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KLEIN Gideon, String Trio

i. Allegro
ii. Lento
iii. Molto vivace
Gideon Klein was born in Moravia in 1919, and, like Zykmud Schul, he studied with Alois Hába at the Prague Conservatoire. In December 1941, along with thousands of other Prague Jews, he was deported to Terezín. It was thus in the environment of a prison camp that Klein reached maturity as a composer in his early twenties. In 1940 he had been awarded a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Music in London, but was prevented from taking this up by the Nazis. He was also an extremely gifted pianist, and gave performances in Terezín of works such as Beethoven’s Sonata Op.111, Schoenberg’s Three Piano Pieces Op.11, and Janáček’s I.X.1905. The String Trio, finished in October 1944, was to be his last work. It’s a piece of great energy and assurance, and stylistically it’s a fascinating mixture of music inspired by Czech dance rhythms, but also by the more expressionist works of the Second Viennese School. Even by the traumatic standards of music written in Terezín, the circumstances in which Gideon Klein composed his String Trio are shocking: by October 1944, when he completed this piece, Klein had witnessed the death of Schul, and nine days after finishing the Trio, he, too, was transported to Auschwitz, along with Pavel Haas, and two other composers – Viktor Ullmann and Hans Krasa. Klein was subsequently moved to a coal-mining labour camp near Katowice. He died on 27 January 1945, but the precise circumstances of his death are uncertain: he either perished in the mining camp, or as one of many fellow-Jews who lost their lives on a brutal forced march made to accompany the fleeing SS.

 

Nigel Simeone © 2011

SMIT Leopold, Trio for Clarinet, Viola and Piano

i. Allegretto 
ii. Lento 
iii. Allegro vivace 

Leopold Smit (1900-1943), known as ‘Leo’, was a Dutch composer. Born in Amsterdam, Smit studied at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam before moving to Paris in 1927 where he was in close contact with the group of composers known as ‘Les Six’ – musicians including Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, and Francis Poulenc who pioneered the ‘neoclassical’ style.  

Smit moved back to Amsterdam in late 1937. In November 1942, he and his wife, Lientje, (both Jewish) were forced to move to the ‘Transvaal’ neighbourhood, a deportation district in the east of Amsterdam. In March 1943, they were summoned to the Jewish Theatre (today again known as Hollandsche Schouwburg and National Holocaust Memorial), then transported to Westerbork. By the end of April, the couple were transported to the Sobibor extermination camp where they were murdered upon arrival. 

Smit’s musical output is small but compelling. He was clearly influenced by the composers in his milieux – his use of polytonality (writing in two or more keys simultaneously) was inspired by the music of Darius Milhaud, for example, while the Trio for flute, viola and harp borrows Debussy’s instrumentation. There are obvious influences of jazz and light music (foxtrot, Charleston and rumba), also; Smit was particularly fond of George Gershwin. 

Smit’s most neoclassical piece is the Symphony in C. Jurjen Vis describes the work: “Mozartian themes are put through a bitonal wringer”. The Divertimento for piano four hands, although jazzier in character, likewise draws on Mozart – the piece was composed as a response to Smit’s continuous playing (with students) piano excerpts of Mozart Symphonies. 

In the Trio for clarinet, viola and piano, broadly developed and sensuous melodies tend to prevail. Composed in 1938, it is written for the instrumentation famously deployed in Mozart’s ‘Kegelstatt’ trio (K. 498). The work is in three movements: an opening Allegretto begins with a stately melody in octaves, then in dialogue with mysterious and chromatically rich, often fragmentary tunes that capriciously change in mood from one moment to the next. The central movement – ‘Lento’ – begins slow and solemn. Piano chords undergird long, winding melodies on the violin and clarinet, before the music develops in harmonic and textural complexity. The final ‘Allegro vivace’ sees pizzicato violin matched by staccato clarinet notes as the interplay between the instruments of the trio grows in intensity, each vying for the foreground before the piece reaches its dramatic conclusion.  

MESSIAEN Olivier, Quartet for the End of Time

Liturgie de Crystal

Vocalise pour l’Ange qui annonce la fin du Temps

Abîme des oiseaux

Intermède

Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus

Danse de la fureur, pour les sept trompettes

Fouillis d’arc-en-ciel, pour l’Ange qui annonce la fin du Temps

Louange à l’Immortalité de Jésus

 

Messiaen composed his Quartet for the End of Time during his captivity as a Prisoner of War at Stalag VIII-A in the autumn of 1940. With three fellow-prisoners to write for – a violinist, cellist and clarinetist – he began by composing a short movement for them to play without piano – the ‘Intermède’. Once the camp authorities had found Messiaen a piano, he set to work on a piece that explores the possibilities of the unusual ensemble in typically inventive ways, using the four instruments together on only a few occasions. The clarinet plays a long solo (‘Abîme des oiseaux’) while the cello and violin each have a slow movement with piano – the two ‘Louanges’, both of which Messiaen recycled from works he’d composed in the 1930s: the Fête des Belles Eaux for the 1937 Paris Exposition and the Diptypque for organ. The first performance of the Quartet took place on 15 January 1941 in one of the camp huts, to an audience of a few hundred prisoners. The audience was either entranced or baffled by what they heard on that extraordinary night. A review in the camp newspaper likened the occasion to the premiere of The Rite of Spring, noting that “it’s often a mark of a work’s greatness that it has provoked conflict on the occasion of its birth.”

 

Nigel Simeone © 2012

About the Artists

Ensemble 360 musicians

Ensemble 360

Ensemble 360 has gained an enviable reputation across the UK for the quality and integrity of their performances. Formed in 2005, eleven musicians of international standing came together to take up residency in South Yorkshire with Music in the Round, establishing a versatile group comprising five string players, five wind players and a pianist.  Get a glimpse of them in performance here.

The Ensemble 360 musicians share a passion for the music which radiates through each performance. Their enthusiasm, drive and musicality captivate audiences both through the quality of their playing and their engaging spoken introductions. Due to the flexible nature of the group’s line-up the repertoire possibilities are enormous; anything from baroque duos, through classical quartets to new commissions for all eleven players. 

 

BACH & THE AMERICAN MINIMALISTS

Shani Diluka

Crucible Playhouse, Sheffield
Friday 31 October 2025, 7.00pm

Tickets:
£23
£17 UC, PIP & DLA
£5 Students & Under 35s

Past Event
Home› What's on› BACH & THE AMERICAN MINIMALISTS

Music by Philip Glass, Meredith Monk and Moondog sits alongside works by JS Bach in this recital by Monegasque-Sri Lankan pianist, Shani Diluka. Described as “one of the greatest of her generation” (Piano Magazine), Diluka’s captivating performance connects across the centuries, from the energy of the American minimalists to Bach’s expressive and technically demanding solo keyboard works. Diluka was appointed to the prestigious French ‘Knighthood for Arts and Letters’, and performs regularly at concert venues including Philharmonie de Paris, Amsterdam Concertgebouw and Vienna Konzerthaus.

JS BACH (arr. Siloti) Prelude in B minor (4′)
GLASS Études: No.2 (7′)
JS BACH Prelude No.1 in C BWV846 (3′)
CPE BACH Solfeggietto (1′)
JARRETT Wild Irish Rose (5′)
GLASS Études: No.9 (4′)
CAGE Dream (8′)
JS BACH Prelude No.12 in F minor BWV857 (3′)
EVANS Danny Boy (extract) (3′)
JS BACH (arr. Petri) Cantata ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’ (5′)
GLASS Mad Rush (15′)
JS BACH (transc. Cortot) Aria BWV1056 (3′)
MOONDOG Canon VIII (2′)
JARRETT Be My Love (5′)
JS BACH (transc. Kempff) Sicilienne BWV1031 (4′)
MONK Rail Road (2′)
JARRETT I Loves You, Porgy (6′)
MOONDOG Barn Dance (2′)
JARRETT Shenandoah (6′)
GLASS ‘Opening’ from ‘Glassworks’ (7′)
JS BACH (arr. Marcello) Adagio from Oboe Concerto BWV974 (4′)
GLASS (arr. Diluka) Tyrol Concerto Mvt.2 (3′)
JS BACH Prelude in C minor from the ‘Well-Tempered Clavier’ BWV847 (3′)

In conversation with Shani Diluka
Crucible Playhouse, 5.30pm – 6.15pm
Tickets £5 / Free to all ticket holders for the evening concert,
but please book here in advance

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Bach and the American Minimalists

In Howards End, E.M. Forster wrote that “it will be generally admitted that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man. All sorts and conditions are satisfied by it.” For scholar Scott Burnham, writing in Beethoven Hero, the composer has “arguably been to music what Socrates was to ancient philosophy: his music is heard as a direct expression of human values.” Yet, if there’s one transition that’s notable in a twenty-first century classical music culture, where Beethoven was a previous generation’s unquestionable genius, another might be set to replace him. In 2019, BBC Music Magazine polled 174 composers for their favorite composer of all time. Bach came out on top.  

 

Much as the porcelain busts, music festivals, and ample representation on concert programmes would lead us to believe, our musical heroes aren’t permanent, and are subject to constantly shifting forces. The fact that we know about Bach’s music at all is mostly thanks to Felix Mendelssohn, who revived Bach’s St Matthew Passion in 1829. (Because of his influential practice of historicism and revivalism—ideas that have fundamentally underpinned classical music culture ever since—there’s a fair argument to be made that Mendelssohn was the world’s most influential classical musician.) 

 

By shining a light on the way these histories are invented and constructed is not to deny the quality of the music. If anything, by showing the workings of these histories—in peeking behind the curtain—these towering world-historical figures become altogether more approachable, and we’re better placed to find ourselves amid their sometimes impenetrable legacies.Shani Diluka’s programme is not just an attempt to make sense of her own relation to Bach, but also how composers of diverse traditions and lineages are drawn to different parts of his artistry. Diluka chairs a big musical discussion, shining light that reflects back and all around. 

 

First comes a quartet of compositions all grouped around a single type of movement—the arpeggio, and its relation, the broken chord. Philip Glass is the modern-day king of the arpeggio; later in the programme, it’s hollowed out and hammered into shape in his Étude No. 9, but it first appears in a more incantory, scalic form in his Étude No. 2, creating something approaching the sound of Chopin. The kind of movement and atmosphere continues what’s been established in Alexander Siloti’s arrangement of Bach’s BMV855a; originally in E minor, Siloti transposes the piece down a fifth, darkens it, and adds pianistic flourishes that really enhance this romantic, watery version of Bach’s original. This section concludes with J.S. Bach’s son Charles Philipp Emanuel, and his Solfeggietto in C Minor, a fast, flourishing and popular toccata-style miniature, almost like a minor-key inversion of the Prelude in C Major by his father that precedes it. 

 

Later in his career, Keith Jarrett made the decision to return to Bach, a formative influence, and commenced a series of recordings on the ECM label of works like the Goldberg Variations, the Sonatas for Violin and Piano, the French Suites and both books of the Well-Tempered Clavier. Listening to My Wild Irish Rose, a song by Chauncey Olcott, and you’ll hear traces of that in the intricate contrapuntal underlay moving methodically under a serene, cantabile melody. That serenity continues in John Cage’s Dream, a gently hovering work originally used as music for a dance piece by Merce Cunningham. 

 

Two short pieces on shape follow. Bach’s Prelude in F Minor slowly builds harmonic shapes through arpeggiated movement, while Bill Evans’ arrangement of Danny Boy starts with unusual shapes, appearing in single gestures with a confidence, before expanding rhythmically into intricate part-leading around the second verse’s climax. 

 

From a pair of pieces on shape, to two pieces with a sense of procession. Mad Rush, a piece by Philip Glass originally for organ, was composed the Dalai Lama’s first public address in North America, in 1979 at New York City’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine. It’s made into an open score with multiple repeats to accommodate the leader’s entrance into the cathedral, and is quintessential Glass; almost all the material is made up of arpeggios of contrasting rhythm, whirring elliptically against one another. Though it comes from a cantata rather than a coronation, the slow-walk rhythms of Bach’s Sheep May Softly Graze give it a stately underlay. This version for solo was arranged by Egon Petri. 

 

During the 1960s, New York’s musically curious would be hard-pressed to miss Moondog: a blind, counter-cultural guru-like figure, dressed like a fantasy Viking and tethered to Manhattan’s 6th Avenue and 53rd Street, here was a gifted composer with a lifelong ambition to realise his particular vision in music. Two pieces by Moondog—a canon in the manner of a Bach Two-Part invention, then Barn Dance—are heard here. The latter is reminiscent particularly of Glass, who let Moondog stay on his couch for a year in exchange for an idiosyncratic musical education; it’s said that Glass learned more from Moondog than he did at Juilliard. In between these Moondog excursions come three songs of sorts: a sweetly melodic Sicilienne by Bach, Jarrett’s take on Be My Love (made popular by Mario Lanza) and Railroad, a short, insistent piece by Meredith Monk subtitled Travel Song. Two more Jarrett arrangements, of I Loves You Porgy from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, and the traditional American song Shenandoah. 

 

The hollowed-out arpeggios from Étude No.9 returns in the opening of Glass’s Glassworks, a project in which the composer sought to create a more “Walkman-friendly” type of writing. This kind of movement also characterises the Tirol Concerto, between which comes a section of Bach’s Oboe Concerto in D Minor, an example of Bach’s resourcefulness as a musician: this reconstructs a section of Marcello’s Concerto for Oboe and Strings, and parts of his own cantata BMV35. Diluka concludes with a work that synthesises all these broken-chord visions: Bach’s tempestuous Prelude in C Minor. 

About the Artists

Shani Diluka

Shani Diluka is internationally recognized as one of the most original and deeply poetic pianists of her generation. She is an exclusive recording artist with Warner Classics and her work is regularly distinguished by the highest critical honors, including the Diapason, Choc de Classica, Gramophone Selection, Japan Arena Award, or choice of Arte and Mezzo. Read more.

BACH IN THE ROUND

Benjamin Nabarro of Ensemble 360

Upper Chapel, Sheffield
Saturday 25 October 2025, 10.30am / 3.30pm
Free event

10.30am – 12.30pm
3.30pm – 6.00pm

Free entry, donations welcome
No need to book, just turn up

Classical violinist Benjamin Nabarro from Ensemble 360
Home› What's on› BACH IN THE ROUND

Another chance to step inside the music of Bach, up-close and reimagined, in this specially created surround-sound installation running alongside Benjamin Nabarro’s recitals in the tranquil setting of Upper Chapel.

To make this innovative, multi-speaker installation, fragments of Ben’s performance of Bach’s Sonata No.1 in G minor were recorded, layered, looped and transformed. Played through eight loudspeakers, visitors will be enveloped in Bach’s life-affirming music, reworked in this unique and immersive sensory experience.

About the Artists

Benjamin Nabarro of Ensemble 360

Described by Musical Opinion as “an outstanding artist”, Benjamin Nabarro has performed throughout Europe, North America, Africa, and the Middle and Far East, as a violin soloist, director and conductor. He has performed with the BBC Symphony, BBC Scottish Symphony, English Chamber and Scottish Chamber Orchestras, and Philharmonia, among others. His concerto performances have won praise for their “purity of style, elegance of phrasing and unsurpassed perfection of technique” (Musical Opinion). Read more.