MOZART & SCHUBERT

Ella Taylor, Robin Ireland & Ensemble 360

Crucible Playhouse, Sheffield

Monday 20 May 2024, 2.30pm

Tickets
£21
£14 UC, DLA or PIP
£5 Under 35s & Students

Past Event

Home› What's on› MOZART & SCHUBERT

MOZART Ach, ich fühl’s! (from The Magic Flute) (5’)
MOZART String Quintet No.4 in G minor K516 (36′)
TRAD. Se solen sjunker (Swedish folksong) (3′)
SCHUBERT Piano Trio No.2 in E flat (44′)

Music in the Round is delighted to welcome Robin Ireland back to the Crucible, a venue he knows so well from his years as violist with the Lindsay String Quartet.

Robin will join Ensemble 360 for one of Mozart’s finest chamber works, his String Quintet in G minor. It’s a work that’s rich in drama, the hallmark of one of the greatest opera composers, and a delicate aria from Mozart’s The Magic Flute will lead straight into the Quintet.

Schubert’s Second Piano Trio was one of the final pieces he completed before his death at the young age of 31. It’s a work of incredible emotional depth, with its most famous melody, frequently used in soundtracks for film and television, inspired by a traditional Swedish folksong.

Note from Guest Curator, Steven Isserlis

“I love connections between songs and chamber works. ‘Ach ich fuhl’s’ from The Magic Flute is not thematically related to Mozart’s great G minor Quintet; but somehow it seems to me to be the perfect prelude to what may be Mozart’s most personal chamber work, the heart-rending introduction to the last movement reportedly composed after he heard of the death of his father. The immortal slow movement of Schubert’s Second Piano Trio, on the other hand, is actually based on the Swedish folksong that we will hear just before the trio. Its mournful refrain of a descending octave – ‘farewell; farewell’ – evidently captured Schubert’s imagination.”

Part of Sheffield Chamber Music Festival 2024.

View the brochure online here or download it below.

DOWNLOAD

Save £s when you book for 5 Music in the Round concerts or more at the same time. Find out more here.

In Act Two of Die Zauberflöte, The Magic Flute, Tamino’s flute has summoned Pamina, but he has taken a vow of silence so cannot talk to her. Fearing that he no longer loves her, Pamina sings this aria in which she wonders if her happiness has gone forever and that she will only find peace in death. Mozart sets these lamentations in a deceptively straightforward style, but also in a key – G minor – which he often reserved for expressing the deepest sadness and tragedy: in parts of the G minor String Quintet and the Symphony No. 40, and in this aria.

1. Allegro
2. Menuetto: Allegretto
3. Adagio ma non troppo
4. Adagio – Allegro

Mozart’s string quintets are all for the combination of two violins, two violas and cellos, with the two violas allowing for particularly rich inner parts. The Quintet in G minor K516 was completed on 16 May 1787, four weeks after his C major Quintet – and during the final illness of his father Leopold, who on 28 May. Though Mozart and his father had a strained relationship by this time, the composer was alarmed at Leopold’s illness and reacted with the now famous letter written on April 1787 in which he declared that ‘death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relations with this best and truest friend of mankind that his image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling!’

The G minor Quintet – written by an estranged son who knew that his father was dying – is probably the most tragic of all Mozart’s chamber works. W.W. Cobbett described it as a ‘struggle with destiny’ and found it ‘filled with the resignation of despair’ – though this is rather to overlook the major-key ebullience of the finale. The first movement is full of restrained pathos, both themes melancholy and understated – and all the more wrenching for that. The minuet is sombre and reflective while the slow movement was, for the great Mozart scholar Alfred Einstein, the desolate core of the work. He likened it to ‘the prayer of a lonely one surrounded on all sides by the walls of a deep chasm.’ The element of tragedy is still very apparent in the slow introduction to the finale; but finally Mozart unleashes a more joyous spirit. The French poet Henri Ghéon found an eloquent description for this turning point: ‘Mozart has had enough. He knew how to cry but he did not like to cry or to suffer for too long.’

NIGEL SIMEONE 2010

This folk song (‘The sun is setting’) was sung by the Swedish tenor Isak Albert Berg at the Viennese home of the Fröhlich sisters, which Schubert visited in 1826 and again in 1827–8. According to Anna Fröhlich, ‘Schubert was so captivated by Berg’s singing that whenever we invited him to spend the evening with us, he always asked: “Is Berg coming? If so, you can absolutely count on my coming.”’ An early biographer noted that Schubert was ‘enchanted with these Swedish songs’, and asked Berg for a copy. He subsequently incorporated one of them into the slow movement of the Piano Trio in E flat, giving it a setting that perhaps sounds more Hungarian than Swedish, but there’s no mistaking the re-use of the tune itself.

1. Allegro
2. Andante con moto
3. Scherzando. Allegro moderato
4. Allegro moderato

Schubert composed the second of his piano trios in November 1827, the same month as he completed the great song-cycle Winterreise and nine months after the death of Beethoven in March 1827. This epic chamber work was, in fact, given one of its earliest performances at a concert by the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna on 26 March on the anniversary of Beethoven’s death – one of the few occasions during Schubert’s lifetime when he enjoyed a major public success. Sadly this was not destined to last: the next known performance of the Trio was in January 1829, at a memorial concert for Schubert, who had died in November 1828. Just when Schubert’s music was at risk of slipping into neglect, it was Robert Schumann – an immensely perceptive critic as well as a composer of genius – who most regularly drew attention to the finest of Schubert’s chamber works. Schumann numbered this E flat Trio among the very greatest, describing it as his ‘last and most individual work of chamber music’ and comparing it with the more genial Trio in B flat major. Schumann wrote that the E flat Trio, which appeared in print just days before Schubert’s death, has travelled ‘across the ordinary musical life of the day like an angry thunderstorm … inspired by deep indignation and boundless longing … spirited, masculine and dramatic.’

In a letter to Heinrich Probst – the Leipzig publisher who had the foresight to publish the piece in 1828 – Schubert gave instructions for performances of the work: ‘Be sure to have it played for the first time by capable people, and particularly to maintain a continual uniformity of tempo at the changes of time signature in the last movement. The minuet at a moderate pace and piano throughout, the trio on the other hand vigorous except where p and pp are marked.’ The sheer scale of the work is extraordinary. Very few chamber works of the time unfold with such timeless nobility, but its length did attract some criticism at the time, and Schubert cut almost 100 bars from the finale before the first edition was issued.

NIGEL SIMEONE, 2010

About the Artists

Ella Taylor

Winner of Second Prize at the 2020 Kathleen Ferrier Awards, Ella Taylor is a soprano with a passion for performing contemporary music and works by women and gender non-conforming artists. They graduated from the Royal Academy of Music, where they gained Distinction in MA Performance, a DipRAM for an outstanding final recital and the Charles Norman Prize and during 2019 / 2020 were a Young Artist at London’s National Opera Studio, their studies generously supported by Cooper Sinclair, the Sybil Tutton Award from Help Musicians UK and the Opera Awards Foundation. They currently study with Elizabeth Ritchie. Accolades include the Lesley Garrett Opera Prize (David Clover Singers Platform), finalist in the Peter Hulsen Orchestral Song Award with the Southbank Sinfonia, and being awarded BBC Chorister of the Year.

Robin Ireland

Robin Ireland was violist with the celebrated Lindsay String Quartet between 1985 and 2005, and with the Primrose Piano Quartet from 2007 till 2015. He was Head of Chamber Music at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire from 2014 till 2021. .He now performs as a soloist and freelance chamber musician and has returned to composing. He is an experienced and enthusiastic viola and violin teacher. He specialises in playing the great unaccompanied works for violin and cello, and is currently recording them.

Robin Ireland was a student at Cambridge University and at the Eastman School of Music, Rochester, New York. He had a short spell as leader of the Las Palmas Symphony Orchestra and subsequently became a founder member of the Piano Quartet, Domus, which toured with its own portable concert hall (a geodesic dome) as well as having great success in more conventional venues. He has broadcast as a soloist on BBC Radio 3, performed Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante with the Liverpool Philharmonic and the London Mozart Players, and has in his repertoire most of the major works for viola. His orchestral experience includes working as guest principal viola with the CBSO, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, RLPO and Opera North. Read more.

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.

VISIONS: AN AFTERNOON OF CHORAL MUSIC

Ella Taylor, Anna Huntley, Darius Battiwalla, Ensemble 360, Abbeydale Singers & Lucy Joy Morris

St Mark's Church, Sheffield

Sunday 19 May 2024, 3.00pm

Tickets
£16
£10 UC, DLA or PIP
£5 Under 35s & Students

Past Event

Home› What's on› VISIONS: AN AFTERNOON OF CHORAL MUSIC

FAURÉ / MESSAGER arr. Morton, Messe des Pêcheurs de Villerville (18′)
FAURÉ Cantique de Jean Racine (6′)
FRANCK Prelude, Fugue and Variation for solo organ (15′)
HOLMÈS La vision de la reine (25’)

An afternoon of glorious choral music.

The Abbeydale Singers perform Cantique de Jean Racine, one of Gabriel Fauré’s most popular works, loved for its beautifully restrained nature and gorgeous harmonies. They are joined by Ensemble 360 for Fauré’s Mass, rarely performed in its entirety, composed in collaboration with his lifelong friend, André Messager, in honour of fishermen from the tiny Normandy village of Villerville.

Organist Darius Battiwalla plays César Franck’s mesmerising Prelude, Fugue and Variation before singers Anna Huntley and Ella Taylor, rising stars of the opera and concert stage, join Ensemble 360 and Abbeydale Singers for the shimmering sounds of the Queen’s Vision by the Irish-French composer Augusta Holmès.

Note from Guest Curator, Steven Isserlis

“This is a programme particularly close to my heart. The Messe des Pêcheurs by Fauré and his lifelong friend André Messager is simply gorgeous; I chanced upon it recently, and just could not stop listening to it. Cantique de Jean Racine, written while Fauré was in late teens and still at school, is a miracle of beauty; and the cantata by Augusta Holmès, the Irish-French firebrand so beloved by Franck, Saint-Saens and many others, is a fascinating curiosity. Such a fine idea to compose the part of the Minstrel not for a singer, but for a cello!”

Part of Sheffield Chamber Music Festival 2024.

View the brochure online here or download it below.

DOWNLOAD

Save £s when you book for 5 Music in the Round concerts or more at the same time. Find out more here.

Kyrie (Messager)
Gloria (Fauré)
Sanctus (Fauré)
O salutaris (Messager)
Agnus Dei (Fauré)

In August 1881, Fauré and Messager were staying with their friends, Camille and Marie Clerc at their summer home in the fishing village of Villerville, on the Normandy coast between Trouville and Honfleur. They had the idea of composing a collaborative Mass to be sung by the women and girls of the village, joined by those on holiday there, for an event to benefit the local fishermen. Preceded by a procession through the village by the fishermen themselves, the first performance was given at the Parish Mass on 3 September 1881 in Villerville’s twelfth-century church with accompaniment for harmonium and violin. A year later Fauré and Messager were again staying with the Clercs and decided to expand the instrumentation for flute, oboe, clarinet, strings and harmonium or organ. Fauré orchestrated the Agnus Dei and Messager took care of the rest and a second performance, using the new version, was given on 10 September 1882. The Fauré scholar Jean-Michel Nectoux has described the work as ‘a little holiday mass’, its music ‘so limpid and so lyrical … delicate, melodious and gentle’. The manuscript remained in the possession of the Clerc family for many years. In 1906, Fauré prepared his Messe basse which used some material from the work, but the original Fauré–Messager Mass was revived in 1980. In 1985, the descendants of the Clerc family donated the manuscript of the Messe des pêcheurs de Villerville to the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and this enchanting work was eventually published in 2000.

The Cantique de Jean Racine was performed at one of the celebrated series of chamber music concerts of the Société Nationale de Musique: on 15 May 1875 it was conducted by the work’s dedicatee, César Franck. Fauré had originally composed it in 1865 for a graduation prize at the École Niedermeyer, where he had studied composition with Saint-Saëns. It won the first prize, showing a young composer of winning melodic gifts. The text is Racine’s French paraphrase of a Latin hymn that ends – very aptly – by asking Christ to look kindly on the songs offered to His glory.

Nigel Simeone ©

Published in 1868 as one of Franck’s 6 pièces d’orgue, the Prélude, fugue et variation was composed around 1860 and bears a dedication ‘à mon ami, Monsieur Camille Saint-Saëns’. The Prelude has strong echoes of Bach (as viewed through the prism of France in the nineteenth century), the flowing right-hand melody set against steady pedal notes. This is followed by a brief section marked Lento which leads to the fugue, in triple time. A held pedal note introduces the closing Variation, an elaboration of the opening Prelude, but now with a much more animated accompaniment. Franck also made an alternative arrangement of this work as a duet for piano and harmonium which he performed at a Société nationale concert with Vincent d’Indy.

Born in Paris to an Irish father, Augusta Holmès added the accent to her surname and became a French national. Though they were never officially married, Holmès and the poet Catulle Mendès lived together from 1869 until 1886, and had five children together, three of whom are depicted playing and singing music in Renoir’s charming painting, The Daughters of Catulle Mendès (in the Metropolitan Museum, New York). Influenced since childhood by Wagner, and counting Liszt among her friends, Holmès’s most important teacher was César Franck with whom she studied from 1876, and to whom she was devoted. La vision de la reine is scored for female voices (soloists and chorus) accompanied by piano, cello and harp, on a text by the composer herself. The score has a dedication to Daniel Colonne and was written to celebrate his birth in 1892. Daniel was the son of the conductor Edouard Colonne and his wife, the singer Eugénie Vergin, and this ‘allegorical cantata’ (as it was described by the publisher) was first performed at the Colonne home in 1893 by an ensemble including Holmès herself (piano), Marguérite Achard (harp) and Jules Loeb – dedicatee and first performer of Fauré’s Élégie – who played the important cello part. In this remarkable cantata, a queen sits by the cradle of her son and listens to the voices of heaven, wisdom, nature, love and homeland before a final choral lullaby in which all the voices and instruments ask for blessings upon the new-born child.