CLASSICAL WEEKEND: BEETHOVEN FOR FLUTE

Ensemble 360

Upper Chapel, Sheffield
Friday 21 March 2025, 1.00pm / 5.15pm

£5 for everyone

Book Tickets
Flautist Juliette Bausor and pianist Tim Horton

BEETHOVEN 
   Flute Sonata in B flat (25’)
   Trio for piano, flute and bassoon (25’)  

Be transported to the classical elegance of an 18th century salon in this concert celebrating Beethoven’s joyful, sparkling music for flute to open Classical Sheffield’s Festival Weekend. Beethoven’s Flute Sonata is full of his characterful wit, while his Trio showcases the dazzling virtuosity of Ensemble 360.  

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BEETHOVEN Ludwig Van, Flute Sonata in B flat, Kinsky Anh. 4

  1. Allegro
  2. Polacca [Polonaise]
  3. Largo
  4. Theme and Variations: Allegretto

 

The authorship of this substantial flute sonata remains a mystery. But even if the identity of the composer remains uncertain, its association with Beethoven is genuine enough: a manuscript copy was found among the composer’s papers after his death. This found its way into the manuscript collection of the publisher Artaria and in their catalogue it appears as a ‘Sonata for piano and flute in B flat. Score. Autograph? Unpublished, probably from Beethoven’s early years.’ By 1970, when the Berlin State Library published a catalogue of its Beethoven holdings, the manuscript was described as a ‘fair copy’ and the attribution to Beethoven as ‘doubtful’. Even so, the title page has a note in pencil ‘Sonata fecit di Bethoe’ (i.e. Beethoven). If it is by Beethoven, then it is certainly an early piece, from his time in Bonn, before he moved to Vienna in 1792. The Beethoven scholar Willy Hess argued that Beethoven would not have kept a copy of the work in his library unless he had some sort of personal connection with it. This is a very fair assumption it gets us no closer to establishing the identity of the composer. It may have been by another pupil of Beethoven’s teacher Christian Gottlob Neefe, or by one of Beethoven’s colleagues from the court orchestra in which he played the viola. A further complication is that it might be a transcription of an as-yet-unidentified sonata for violin and piano, something suggested by the unidiomatic flute writing at the very start.  

Whatever the facts about its attribution, the Flute Sonata is a work of considerable charm, with some attractive ideas. In place of a minuet, the second movement is a Polonaise, the slow movement a song-like Largo and the finale a set of variations. 

BEETHOVEN Ludwig Van, Trio for Flute, Bassoon and Piano in G WoO.37

Allegro
Adagio
Tema andante con variazioni

 

Composed between 1786 and 1790, while Beethoven was still living in Bonn, the manuscript of this early work described it as a “Trio concertant à Clavibembalo, Flauto [e] Fagotto”. Whether it was ever played with a harpsichord is unclear, but it was composed for domestic music-making by the family of Baron Friedrich von Westerholt-Gysenberg, Equerry to the Elector of Bonn. The Baron himself was a bassoonist, his son Wilhelm was a flautist, and his daughter, Maria Anna Wilhelmine, was a fine pianist – according to Beethoven’s own teacher Neefe, her playing was “fiery” and of “marvellous accuracy”. For a time she was adored by the young Beethoven, who taught her the piano for several years before her marriage in 1792 and even sent her poetry declaring that “My heart will never change, and I will cherish you forever!”

 

Nigel Simeone © 2012

REVOLUTION: SHOSTAKOVICH STRING QUARTETS

Ensemble 360

Upper Chapel, Sheffield
Saturday 8 March 2025, 7.00pm

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

Book Tickets
String players of Ensemble 360

SHOSTAKOVICH 
   String Quartet No.10 (26’)
   String Quartet No.12 (27’) 

Ensemble 360 performs two of Shostakovich’s late string quartets in this, the second concert of Music in the Round’s Shostakovich Weekend. Music of extremes, these quirky quartets are at times exuberant, at others sombre, and often capricious, playful and energetic.  

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Part of Music in the Round’s Shostakovich Weekend, Saturday 8 & Sunday 9 March 2025 

Immerse yourself in the chamber music of enigmatic Soviet-Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), one of the most important composers of the 20th century. This specially curated weekend of music and insights celebrating the composer in his 50th anniversary year includes performances of his intimate chamber works and a fascinating Roundtable with Durham University’s specialist in Soviet music, Professor Patrick Zuk. 

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CONFLICT: SHOSTAKOVICH STRING QUARTETS

Ensemble 360

Upper Chapel, Sheffield
Saturday 8 March 2025, 2.00pm

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

Book Tickets
Ensemble 360 string quartet musicians

SHOSTAKOVICH 
   String Quartet No.3 (33’)
   String Quartet No.8 (20’) 

Shostakovich’s most famous String Quartet No.8 takes centre stage, performed alongside Quartet No.3. Deeply expressive, raw and emotional, both quartets are rich with evocation and allusion – to Shostakovich’s own work, to the sounds of battle, and with his response in the aftermath of war. 

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Part of Music in the Round’s Shostakovich Weekend, Saturday 8 & Sunday 9 March 2025 

Immerse yourself in the chamber music of enigmatic Soviet-Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), one of the most important composers of the 20th century. This specially curated weekend of music and insights celebrating the composer in his 50th anniversary year includes performances of his intimate chamber works and a fascinating Roundtable with Durham University’s specialist in Soviet music, Professor Patrick Zuk. 

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SHOSTAKOVICH Dmitri, String Quartet No.3 in F major Op.73

Shostakovich began his Third String Quartet in January 1946 but made no progress beyond the second movement until May when he went with his family to spend the summer at a dacha near the Finnish border. According to Beria (head of the Soviet secret police) in a letter to Shostakovich, this retreat was a personal gift from Stalin. It was a productive summer and the quartet was completed on 2 August 1946. The same day Shostakovich wrote to Vassily Shirinsky, second violinist of the Beethoven Quartet: ‘I have never been so pleased with a composition as with this Quartet. I am probably wrong, but that is exactly how I feel right now.’ The Beethoven Quartet gave the first performance at the Moscow Conservatory on 16 December 1946. Though there was an ominous silence from official critics, Shostakovich’s reputation was still high among the nation’s leaders: on 28 December he was given the Order of Lenin and each member of the Beethoven Quartet received the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. Just a year later the Third Quartet was denounced in the journal Sovetskaya musika as ‘modernist and false music.’

Although Shostakovich had no overt programme in mind, he invested a great deal of private emotion in the work – sufficient, as Fyodor Druzhinin (violist of the Beethoven Quartet) recalled, for the music to move the composer to tears when he attended a rehearsal in the 1960s, twenty years after he had written it. The start of the first movement, in F major, recalls the Haydn-like mood of the Ninth Symphony (completed in 1945) and this is followed by a contrasting idea, played pianissimo. The development includes some turbulent fugal writing, injecting a sense of unease that hovers over the rest of the movement. The Moderato con moto (in E minor) is based on a series of sinister ostinato figures and frequent repetitions while the third movement is a violent scherzo in G sharp minor. The Adagio is an extended passacaglia (ground bass) that gives way to a Moderato in which some kind of resolution is found in the closing bars, ending with three pizzicato F major chords.

 

Nigel Simeone

SHOSTAKOVICH Dmitri, String Quartet No.8

Largo 
Allegro molto 
Allegretto 
Largo 
Largo 
 

The Eighth String Quartet is often considered to be a kind of musical autobiography, permeated throughout with Shostakovich’s musical monogram, D–S–C–H (D, E flat, C, B). In an interview with Elizabeth Wilson, the cellist Valentin Berlinsky (a founder member of the Borodin Quartet) said that it was ‘a landmark, the summing up of a whole period in the composer’s life. The quotations from the composer’s previous works give it the character of autobiography.’

The quartet was composed very quickly (from 12 to 14 July 1960) during a visit to Gohrish, near Dresden. The printed dedication is ‘In memory of the victims of fascism and war’. To his friend Isaak Glickman, Shostakovich wrote – in a letter dripping with irony – that it was ‘ideologically flawed and of no use to anybody’. But what followed was a remarkable and much more personal revelation: ‘When I die, it’s unlikely that someone will write a quartet dedicated to my memory, so I decided to write it myself. One could write on the title page: “Dedicated to the author of this quartet” … And the quartet makes use of themes from my own works.’ But for all the sardonic mood of this letter, the composer was in an extremely emotional state when he composed it. He told Glickman that ‘the pseudo-tragedy of the quartet is so great that, while composing it, my tears flowed abundantly.’

Just after his return from Dresden he played the work through to a friend in Moscow, admitting that it would be his ‘last work’ and even hinting that it was a kind of suicide note. He had just been coerced into joining the Soviet Communist party and was in a mood of utter despair. In other words, for Shostakovich, it seems that the real ‘victim’ he had in mind when composing this quartet was himself. Like the Third Quartet, the Eighth is in five movements, played without a break. These constitute a deeply moving and sometimes harrowing tapestry of violently shifting moods and musical self-quotations, all held together by the DSCH motif which seems to haunt the whole work. 

 

© Nigel Simeone 

BACH IN THE ROUND

Ensemble 360

Upper Chapel, Sheffield
Saturday 22 February 2025,

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

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.  

BACH FOR SOLO VIOLIN

Ensemble 360

Upper Chapel, Sheffield
Saturday 22 February 2025, 2.00pm / 7.00pm

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

Book Tickets
Classical violinist Benjamin Nabarro from Ensemble 360

BACH
   Sonata No.2 in A minor BWV1003 (20’)
   Partita No.2 in D minor BWV1004 (30’) 

Returning for the second in his series of solo Bach recitals, Ensemble 360 violinist Benjamin Nabarro performs two masterpieces of the Baroque, JS Bach’s spellbinding Sonata No.2 and Partita No.2.  

Some of the finest music ever composed for violin, Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas are unmatched for their emotional power, rich drama and technical excellence. Extraordinarily virtuosic, Bach conjures two, three, even four voices from the solo violin in this dazzling tour-de-force of music-making. 

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BACH J.S., Sonata No.2 and Partita No.2 for solo violin

 

On Bach’s autograph fair copy of the Sonatas and Partitas he calls them ‘Six Solos for violin without bass accompaniment’. They were completed in 1720, the date Bach added beneath his signature on the title page, though it is likely that he had been working on them before then. These magnificent pieces stand as one of the greatest monuments of Baroque instrumental music, but there were earlier unaccompanied violin pieces that may have inspired Bach to write his own: in particular, the six partitas by Johann Paul von Westhoff (1656–1705); the unaccompanied Passacaglia which Heinrich Biber (1644–1704) composed as an epilogue to his Rosary Sonatas in about 1676; and the six partitas by Biber’s pupil Johann Joseph Vilsmaÿr (1663–1722), published in 1715.  

The Second Sonata is in four movements, with a slow opening movement followed by a faster fugue. The finale is characterised by fast, continuous writing full of the kind of kinetic energy that fuels so much of Bach’s music, while the third movement is a flowing Andante in C major. Some of Bach’s most innovative writing is to be found in the fugue – a marvel of ingenuity that also allows players to demonstrate virtuosity. Bach was writing for players of the greatest skill: he may have performed them himself and it is known that Johann Georg Pisendel – one of the finest players of the age – also performed Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas. There’s a brilliant kind of musical sleight-of-hand involved in the fugue: the violin is essentially an instrument designed to play a single melodic line, but here Bach requires the violin to play two or more lines at once, sometimes supported by bass lines that it also supplies itself.  

The Second Partita, in D minor, begins with an Allemanda that sets quite an austere tone and is notable for its absence of multiple-stopping. The Corrente that follows is largely unadorned, as is the fourth movement, a Gigue. However, in the third, a Sarabanda, Bach produces rich chordal writing (including quadruple-stopping) which provides not only a complete contrast of tempo and mood, but also of instrumental texture. But the pinnacle of the Second Partita is its closing Ciaconna (Chaconne) – aptly described by Nicholas Anderson as ‘a veritable Goliath of the violin repertory, built on a noble and declamatory theme.’ This broad and imposing initial idea is then treated to no fewer than sixty-four developing variations which seem to explore every possible facet of the theme with apparently effortless brilliance, the character of the music changing constantly (including an extended section in D major), before finally returning to the opening idea, and ending on two repeated Ds, finishing this mighty structure with the same two notes as the whole Partita began.   

After Bach’s death one notable exponent of these works was Haydn’s friend Johann Peter Salomon (1745–1815). Johann Friedrich Reichardt recalled Salomon in 1774 playing ‘the splendid solos without accompaniment by Seb. Bach, in which the setting is often developed in two or three parts, but also in one voice delightfully invented, so that any further accompaniment seems superfluous.’ The fugue from the Second Sonata that was the first movement to appear in print, published in 1798 as one of the examples in Jean-Baptiste Cartier’s L’Art du violon. The whole collection appeared for the first time in 1802, issued by the Bonn firm of Simrock. For most of the nineteenth century violinists regarded these works as technical exercises, until Joseph Joachim presented the Sonatas and Partitas in concerts, and even in the recording studio – in 1903, he made records of several movements that are extraordinarily evocative. It was largely thanks to Joachim’s efforts that the Sonatas and Partitas finally came to be recognised as one of the creative pinnacles of the violin repertory. 

ROMANTIC PIANO TRIOS

Leonore Piano Trio

Upper Chapel, Sheffield
Friday 14 February 2025, 7.00pm

Tickets:
£22
£14 UC, PIP & DLA
£5 Students & Under 35s 

Past Event
Leonore Piano Trio featuring violinist Benjamin Nabarro, pianist Tim Horton and cellist Gemma Rosefield

R SCHUMANN Fantasiestucke Op.73 (11’)
C SCHUMANN Piano Trio in G minor (29’) 
BRAHMS Scherzo from the F-A-E Sonata (6’)
R SCHUMANN Trio in F Op.80 (26’) 

A celebration of love and romance, this special St Valentine’s Day concert sees the Leonore Trio performing music composed by Clara Schumann and her husband Robert. From the strident violin melodies of Clara’s Piano Trio in G minor to the impassioned piano writing of Robert’s Trio in F, this promises to be a spellbinding evening full of passion, intensity and fervour. 

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SCHUMANN Robert, Fantasiestücke, Op.73

  1. Zart und mit Ausdruck (Tender and with expression)
  2. Lebhaft, leicht (Lively, light)
  3. Rasch und mit Feuer (Fast and with fire)

 

During a feverish period of composing activity in February 1849, Schumann wrote his Fantasiestücke Op. 73 in two days, and he offered them immediately to the publisher Luckhardt in Kassel. Composer and publisher moved quickly, and Schumann returned the corrected proofs by early June 1849. The original title had been ‘Soirée Pieces’, but this was changed before publication. Originally conceived for clarinet and piano, the suggested alternative scoring for violin or cello had probably come from the publisher, but it was one which the composer was very happy. The first performance of the original clarinet and piano version was given at a concert in Leipzig on 14 January 1850. The three movements are the most poetic examples of Schumann’s lyrical writing, particularly the first two. And even in the passionately animated third movement, the ‘fire’ is not that of anger but of elation. 

Nigel Simeone 2024 

SCHUMANN Clara, Piano Trio in G minor, Op.17

  1. Allegro moderato
  2. Scherzo: Tempo di Menuetto
  3. Andante
  4. Allegretto

 

Clara Schumann composed her Piano Trio in G minor in 1846 at a time of considerable distress in the Schumann household: the Schumanns’ fourth child, Emil, was extremely sickly (he died the next year), and Robert’s mental health was giving cause for concern; and Clara herself suffered a miscarriage in the middle of composing the trio. It was written amidst all this personal and family turmoil between May and September 1846, mostly in Dresden but with some work on it during a much-needed break on Norderney, one of the East Frisian Islands. completing it a year before Robert’s first attempt at the form (he acknowledged its influence on his own work). The first movement is a passionately argued Allegro moderato in sonata form, opening with an ardent first subject on the violin, over a quiet but agitated piano accompaniment. The fluency and skill with which the musical argument is presented is unsurprising from such an experienced musician – Clara was one of the greatest pianists of the nineteenth century and one of the best educated – but what is truly remarkable is the originality and character of the musical ideas themselves, whether in the drama of the first movement, the elegant charm of the Scherzo–Minuet, the glorious song-like theme which dominates the Andante, or the Allegretto finale. This is another sonata form movement, but its development section also features a good deal of fugal writing. It is only in the last four bars that the music turns from G minor to G major – but there’s no easy sense of victory here, more – perhaps – a fleeting glimpse of happier times to come.   

BRAHMS Johannes, Scherzo from the FAE Sonata

This Scherzo formed the third movement of a sonata written jointly by Robert Schumann, Albert Dietrich and Brahms as a surprise for their friend Joseph Joachim when he visited Düsseldorf in October 1853. The three-note motto F–A–E (‘Frei aber einsam’ – ‘Free but lonely’) was associated with Joachim and is used in all the movements of what Schumann called ‘the FAE Sonata surprise’. Dietrich wrote the first movement, Schumann and second and fourth, and Brahms the third. Joachim played it through for the first time – with Clara Schumann at the piano – on 28 October 1853 and, as they played the work, he had to guess the composer of each movement. This Allegro by a very young Brahms already has hints of the mature musician to come. It was only published posthumously, but as one critic wrote when it was issued by Brahms-Gesellschaft in 1906, ‘it shows a few characteristic traits of the master [and] people will be interested to take note of it.’ 

Nigel Simeone 2024

SCHUMANN Robert, Piano Trio in F major, Op.80

Sehr lebhaft
Mit innigem Ausdruck
In mässiger Bewegung
Nicht zu rasch

 

Schumann’s Second Piano Trio was initially sketched in 1847, while he was still finishing the Op.63 Trio, but it was not completed until nearly two years later, in April 1849. Written in the pastoral key of F major, it is a very different work from its much darker and more dramatic predecessor. The reason for this is immensely touching: when Schumann began work, it was the tenth anniversary of his secret engagement to Clara, and the Trio is full of allusions to their first love. As Joan Chisell wrote: ‘no further guesses are needed as to why the first two movements are threaded with the opening phrase (“In the depths of my heart I keep a radiant image of you”) of his love-song Intermezzo (from the Eichendorff Liederkreis Op.39) written for Clara just before their eventual long-delayed marriage in 1840.’ The first movement, in quick triple time, is both lively and ardently lyrical, while the song-like slow movement is a radiant outpouring of adoration. The third movement Scherzo is in a minor key, gentle and wistful. After this nostalgic interlude, the finale ends the work in a state of almost untroubled elation. For Clara Schumann this piece remained a great favourite among her husband’s works – partly, no doubt, because of its intimate private messages, but also because it shows Schumann at his most effortlessly inventive. The first performance was given in their house on 29 April 1849, in a private concert that also included the première of Schumann’s Spanisches Liederspiel for four solo voices and piano, and Clara subsequently played it on many occasions.

 

Nigel Simeone © 2014

VIENNESE MASTERWORKS: BRAHMS & MORE FOR SOLO PIANO

Tim Horton

Upper Chapel, Sheffield
Saturday 8 February 2025, 7.00pm

Tickets:
£22
£14 UC, PIP & DLA
£5 Students & Under 35s 

Past Event
Pianist Tim Horton

HAYDN Andante and Variations in F minor Hob. XVII:6 (15’)
BERG Sonata Op.1 (11’)
MOZART Piano Sonata No.4 in E flat K282 (12’)
WEBERN Variations Op.27 (6’)
BRAHMS Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel Op.24 (26’) 

Tim Horton returns for the second instalment of his popular recital series exploring music from Vienna, a city famed for its history of classical music-making. Popular works by Haydn and Mozart are presented alongside 20th-century gems from Second Viennese School composers Berg and Webern, and the concert concludes with Brahms’s extraordinarily inventive Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel.  

Post-concert Q&A FREE to all ticket-holders
Please join us after the concert for an informal Q&A with Tim Horton and Music in the Round’s Programme Manager for Sheffield, Benjamin Tassie. 

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HAYDN Joseph, Andante with Variations in F minor, Hob.XVII/6

One of Haydn’s most remarkable piano works, this set of variations is on two themes, the first in F minor, the second in F major. The autograph manuscript (in New York Public Library) is headed ‘Sonata’ and dated 1793, while a manuscript copy with a title page in Haydn’s hand title calls it ‘Un piccolo divertimento scritto e composto per la stimatissima Signora de Ployer’ (Barbara von Ployer, for whom Mozart composed the Piano Concerto K453). Haydn took the work with him to London on his second visit (1794–5) where he played it on one of Broadwood pianos that he had come to admire on his first trip to England. It was not published until 1799, when it was given the title ‘Variations’, and a new dedication: to Baroness Josephine von Braun, wife of the director of the court theatres in Vienna and also the dedicatee of Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas Op. 14. Haydn originally ended the work with the second F major variation and a short coda. He then had second thoughts, adding a reprise of the F minor theme and a long, harmonically adventurous coda that ends in despair. It has been suggested – not unreasonably – that the tragic mood of this work may owe something to the sudden death in January 1793 of Haydn’s close friend Maria Anna von Genzinger.

BERG Alban, Piano Sonata, Op.1

Alban Berg first met Schoenberg in 1904 and continued to study with his until 1910. It’s not certain exactly when he composed the Piano Sonata, but towards the end of his studies Berg started to work on exercises in sonata structures and it is likely that the work emerged from these in 1907–8. Published in 1910 by Schlesinger in Berlin and Haslinger in Vienna, the first public performance took place in Vienna on 24 April 1911, given by Etta Werndorff, another member of the Schoenberg circle who also gave the premiere of Schoenberg’s Klavierstücke Op. 11 (Schoenberg also painted her portrait twice). Douglas Jarman (in New Grove) described Berg’s Sonata as ‘the last work he wrote directly under his teacher’s guidance … in effect his graduation piece, the work in which he set out to demonstrate what he had learned from both Schoenberg’s teaching and Schoenberg’s music.’ The Sonata is a single movement, highly concentrated, in which Berg generates a number of distinctive ideas from short motifs (heard at the start) which serve as the musical seeds for a work of powerful originality. Following the precepts of his teacher, Berg is not afraid to look to the past for inspiration and the structure is broadly in sonata form (exposition–development–recapitulation). The musical language is more uncompromising, stretching the possibilities of post-Wagnerian harmonies to breaking point, but always with a highly expressive trajectory that is as much emotional as it is architectural. Berg’s Sonata is an outstanding ‘Opus One’, the young composer’s creative voice emerging more or less fully formed. 

 

Nigel Simeone 2024

MOZART Wolfgang Amadeus, Piano Sonata in E flat K282

Adagio 
Menuetto I, Menuetto II 
Allegro 
 

Mozart composed his first set of six solo piano sonatas in 1774 and 1775. The 18-year-old composer spent three months in Munich working on his opera La finta giardinera (first performed on 13 January 1775) and the last of the set (K.284) was written for Baron von Dürnitz in Munich. The other five (including K.282) were composed either in Salzburg during 1774, or in Munich on Mozart’s arrival in the city. Each of the sonatas in this set is in three movements, but K.282 is the only one to begin with a slow movement. This is an expansive Adagio based on two themes and incorporating a development of the first theme as part of the second half of the movement, after which this theme is only heard again in the coda. This is followed by a Minuet, in B flat major with a contrasting second Minuet at the centre of the movement in the work’s home key of E flat. The main theme of the finale is notable for its leaping octaves and a mood of high spirits.   

WEBERN Anton, Variations, Op.27

Sehr mäßig (Very moderate) 
Sehr schnell (Very fast) 
Ruhig fließend (Calmly flowing) 
 

Almost thirty years after Berg’s Sonata, Webern’s Variations, Op. 27 is a work which demonstrates twelve-tone technique at its most refined and distilled. The title only tells part of the story. The third movement – and the first to be finished, in July 1936 – was described by René Leibowitz (the leading French apostle for the Second Viennese School) as a set of five variations. This is confirmed by Webern himself: ten days after finishing the third movement he wrote that ‘the completed part is a set of variations. The whole work will be a kind of Suite.’ According to Webern himself, the first movement (completed in August 1936) is in sonata form, while the second (November 1936) is a kind of scherzo. In other words, Webern’s idea of calling the complete piece a ‘Suite’ is perhaps a better description of the overall structure than ‘Variations’. The first performance was given in 1937 by Peter Stadlen who worked closely with Webern while preparing the premiere. His copy, marked up by Webern (published in 1979) contains several revelations. The most important of these is that Webern did not see this piece as an exercise in chilly abstraction – the very first page is covered in markings suggesting highly expressive music: ‘coolly passionate lyricism’ at the start, ‘molto espressivo’ a few bars later, and so on. Always conscious of his musical heritage, Webern likened the first movement to a late Brahms intermezzo, and the second movement to the ‘Badinerie’ from Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 2. The result is music that is challenging for listener and player, but enormously rewarding too. 

BRAHMS Johannes, Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel, Op.24

Brahms composed the Handel Variations in 1861, when he was in his late twenties. The dedication is to Clara Schumann to whom Brahms presented the variations as a birthday present. Comprising twenty-five concise variations and a much more expansive closing fugue, the work is ingeniously structured in what Nicholas Cook described as ‘a series of waves, both in terms of tempo and dynamics, leading to the final fugue.’ The theme was drawn from the third movement of Handel’s Harpsichord Suite No. 1 in B flat. Intriguingly, this is entitled ‘Aria con varizioni’: in other words, Brahms created a new set of variations on a theme that was originally intended to be treated that way. Brahms wrote that for him the most important feature of a variation theme was not the melody but the bass line: ‘it is the firm foundation on which I can build my stories … Over the given bass, I invent something new and discover new melodies about it.’ The essential point here is not that the bass line should be unchanged (Brahms makes plenty of changes) but that he viewed it as the way to control the overall structure. The expressive range of the Handel Variations – their emotional ebb-and-flow – is remarkable: the first five variations move from the lively syncopated accents of Variation 1, to the sinuous lines of Variation 2, the elegance of Variation 3, the powerful octaves of Variation 4 and the lyrical minor-key contrasts of Variation 5. These are all wonderful examples of the ‘new melodies’ Brahms was able to discover in Handel’s theme, and the process is continued with astonishing imagination in all the variations that follow, culminating in the magnificent final fugue, its subject derived from the opening phrase of Handel’s theme. Combining pianistic virtuosity and the most imaginative handling of counterpoint, it is a heroic peroration. 

Nigel Simeone 2024 

SOUNDS OF NOW: QUARTET FOR HEART & BREATH

Phaedra Ensemble & Lotte Betts-Dean

Upper Chapel, Sheffield
Saturday 25 January 2025, 8.00pm

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

Past Event
Mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean

RICHARD REED PARRY Quartet for Heart and Breath (6’)
KATE WHITLEY Six Charlotte Mew Settings (16’)
JOHN TAVENER The World (10’)
New Commission (8’)
MEREDITH MONK String Songs (20’)
CASSANDRA MILLER Thanksong (12’) 

Music by Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry opens this concert of sumptuous, 21st century compositions for string quartet, performed by Phaedra Ensemble with Lotte Betts-Dean, a vocalist praised by The Guardian for her “unmissable, urgent musicality”.  

Following its collaboration with American composer Meredith Monk, performer and Godmother of the New York experimental music scene, Phaedra performs the composer’s only string quartet, String Songs. Mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean then joins the quartet to present works by Kate Whitley and John Tavener, as well as Cassandra Miller’s modern masterpiece Thanksong, a tender reflection on Beethoven’s late Quartet in A minor (Op.132).  

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PARRY Richard Reed, Quartet for Heart & Breath

Richard Reed Parry is best known as a guitarist in the Canadian rock band Arcade Fire. Quartet for Heart and Breath is one of a series of pieces that Parry began work on during the band’s mammoth 2004-5 tour, that all have the same conceptual starting point: every note is played in sync with the heartbeat or breath of the musicians. While they are performing, the musicians wear stethoscopes under their clothes so they can clearly hear their own heartbeats, which in turn regulate their individual tempos. 

 

The idea for Parry’s concept came about through reaction. After listening to a tranche of electroacoustic music that didn’t he didn’t feel any profound connection to, Parry sought a way to make music intimately connected to musicians’ bodies. Rather than opting for repetitive rhythms or dance figures, he decided to go deeper, beyond the skill of trained musicians, and straight for corporeal intuition. He began conceiving music directly related to the involuntary aspects of bodily functions: the speed of breath, eyes blinking, hearts beating. 

 

When composing for others, Parry’s musical world brings together the minimal musical palettes of Steve Reich and Brian Eno, and the musical systems of John Cage. Parry was interested in the latter through his pieces like I Ching, which use chance procedures to gradually relinquish the control the composer has over the realisation of the work. The result here is a naturally jumbled collection of tumbling rhythms, that manages to find a surprisingly soothing character amid the chaos. 

 

Hugh Morris 2024 

WHITLEY Kate, Mew Settings

“I think her very good and interesting and unlike anyone else,” Virginia Woolf remarked of the poet Charlotte Mew. Born in 1869, Mew lived precariously in London; a life punctuated by tragic family circumstances, and with an aversion to any kind of publicity, she nevertheless possessed a selection of high-profile admirers from the city’s literary scene, including Thomas Hardy and Siegried Sassoon. Mew’s poem The Farmer’s Bride (1912) brought her wider acclaim. In that verse, a farmer takes a bride, and laments that she won’t reciprocate his desires. The folksy metre and bucolic imagery disguise what is a creepy, at times startling poem on a young woman’s objectification at the hands of an older man maddened by desire. 

 

In 2020, Whitley, a composer and founder of Peckham’s Multi-Story Orchestra, reworked two separate collections of Mew settings (for male and female voice) into a new six-movement work for soprano and quartet. (“I like how the gender of the speaker in Mew’s poems is often ambiguous, so it has seemed to make sense,” she wrote in 2020.) Sea Love reminisces on a lover through a folk dialect, accompanied by waves of solo violin arpeggios. The folk-tinged feeling continues in The Farmer’s Bride, with scuttling string figures giving this movement a darkly theatrical quality. The sea returns as a theme in Rooms; where in Sea Love, it’s “everlastin,’” by Rooms, the sea becomes a “maddening” sound, outside a room “with a seaweed smell.” (Some of Mew’s artistic preoccupations involve confinement, feeling trapped, and longing to explore, themes that crop up in the first three settings.) 

 

The fourth movement, I so liked Spring, works in a mirror form. For voice and solo violin once more, the two stanzas give reflections on a season before and after a lover. Where there’s a slight defiance to the previous text, Absence speaks to the intense anguish of the narrator’s loss; Whitley’s setting is sparse and spacious, with soprano accompanied mostly by gently plucked strings. There’s more pain in the final poem, Moorland Night, but it’s a pain that arrives through searching rather than inward reflection. Travelling through a harsh-weathered landscape, the narrator describes the search for “The Thing.” Mew’s narrator soon finds this Thing, yet, after such anguish, seems to find solace as she vows to return that Thing to the earth. Whitley’s animated setting is similarly journeying. 

 

Hugh Morris 2024 

TAVENER John, The World

The World for string quartet and soprano solo should be performed at maximum intensity throughout. White hot, white cold – intensely loud, intensely soft – almost unbearable – that which is nowhere and everywhere – not human but divine – theanthropic.” These, the words of the piece’s composer, John Tavener. His ten-minute setting of the poet Kathleen Raine for soprano and quartet certainly lends itself to such extremities of thinking. 

 

Despite the serene timbres, The World works in a currency of simple gestures taken to their limits, but the extremes Tavener finds comes through austerity rather than exuberance. The piece is built around a few key ideas: beginning with striking plucked chords, the soprano introduces a coupletted stepping motion which is passed around the ensemble. The fiendish soprano part finishes this theme with a flourish—a long, quiet, sustained note, suspended above the ensemble. A squiggly chorale-like passage brings the strings back together in rhythmic unison around an anchoring mid-range drone, and the whole sequence repeats again. Through these kinds of creative austerity, Tavener achieves a steely focus. 

 

Hugh Morris 2024 

MONK Meredith, Stringsongs

Meredith Monk’s string quartet Stringsongs was written in 2004, and premiered at the Barbican in 2005 by the Kronos Quartet. Her first creation for these forces represented yet another strand for an artist whose uninhibited creating has seen her touch disciplines as varied as singing, composing, dance, choreography, visual art and playwriting. 

 

In creating this extremely coherent yet slightly strange quartet, Monk got to know the players of the Kronos Quartet intimately. “The music came to life in surprising ways, colored by the distinctive ‘voice’ of each musician,” she wrote in a programme note. Perhaps the best example of this is Tendrils, the beautifully drawn-out, delicately crafted second movement which serves as the piece’s emotional core. Each player plays a wistful monologue, woven into an ensemble texture that spins forward for nine unbroken minutes. 

 

Tendrils follows Cliff Edge; Monk’s straightforward harmonic and melodic building blocks never quite move as you expect, creating dissonances that are unexpectedly raw, while further intensifying the austere double-stopped chords that become a theme of the movement. The third movement, Obsidian Chorale, is the most ostensibly vocal of the four movements—after the unbroken polyphony of Tendrils, the quartet moves through a sequence of dark, quiet chords in unison, for barely two minutes. Phantom Strings, a fast final movement based on a chugging, uneven ostinato, doesn’t so much conclude as stop, ending this enigmatic piece with more questions than answers. 

 

Hugh Morris 2024

MILLER Cassandra, Thanksong

Over the course of her career, Cassandra Miller, a Canadian composer currently living in London, has developed her own idiosyncratic way of composing that she calls “transformative mimicry.” Her music is usually rooted in other music that already exists; she listens to it, sings back a version of the parts, and then either sketches them using musical notation, or, in the case of Thanksong, creates an aural score out of her recordings. In a performance of Thanksong, each member of the ensemble listens to their own part on headphones, and plays by ear. 

 

For this piece, her source material was the third movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 15 Op. 132 in A minor, known as the Heiliger Dankgesang, after the thankful message Beethoven put at the heading of this movement. He had recently recovered from an intense intestinal illness, and described the third, a slow movement, as a “Holy song of thanksgiving of a convalescent to the Deity.” 

 

Miller’s piece is one to get lost in. It has few grand milestones, preferring instead a more intimate language of blurred, burbling lines, encoding the feeling of players feeling their way through the piece into the composition. It’s delicate, and personal. 

 

Hugh Morris 2024 

MENDELSSOHN OCTET

Ensemble 360 & Consone Quartet

Upper Chapel, Sheffield
Saturday 26 October 2024, 7.00pm

Tickets
£22
£14 UC, DLA & PIP
£5 Under 35s & Students 

Past Event
String quartet players of classical music group Ensemble 360, with their instruments

FELIX MENDELSSOHN
   Theme and Variations from Four Pieces Op.81 (6’)
   String Quartet in E flat Op.44 No.3 (35’)
   Octet Op.20 (34’) 

Music in the Round’s new Visiting String Quartet, the Consone Quartet, made their spellbinding Sheffield debut with a rapturously received celebration of the quartets of Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn in spring 2024.  

They return to Sheffield this autumn for an immersive afternoon and evening exploring more of Felix Mendelssohn’s quartets.  

To conclude the day, the Consone Quartet joins forces with the string players of Ensemble 360 for the composer’s eloquent and warm Octet, full of gusto and joyful invention. 

View the brochure online here or download it below.

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MENDELSSOHN Felix, Theme and Variations (from Four Pieces for String Quartet), Op. 81, No. 1

This Theme and Variations – composed in 1847 – was published posthumously as the first of Mendelssohn’s Four Pieces for String Quartet, Op. 81. Like its companion Scherzo, the undated manuscript is believed to have been written in the last few weeks of Mendelssohn’s life. Marked Andante sostenuto, the poised, elegant theme is presented by the violin, before being taken over by the viola, against a gentle, syncopated accompaniment. The next variation, in triplets, is slightly faster and gives way to a variation where the first violin plays a florid semiquaver descant over sustained chords. The fast-moving phrases are then transferred to the cello before the tempo changes to a vigorous Presto (in 6/8 time), the key now shifting from major to minor. A brief solo violin cadenza leads to coda back in the home key of E major, based on a varied recollection of the opening material and a serene close.  

Nigel Simeone © 2024 

MENDELSSON Felix, String Quartet in E flat Op. 44 No. 3

In Robert Schumann’s retrospective of concerts in Leipzig during 1837–8, he wrote that concerts of string quartets in the small hall of the Gewandhaus “gave us many artistic treasures this winter.” These innovative chamber music concerts were established by Ferdinand David, a close friend of Mendelssohn’s and leader of the Gewandhaus Orchestra. Schumann singled out Mendelssohn and his two newest string quartets (Op.44 Nos.2 and 3) as works that “wandered through a finely human sphere … in such a sphere we must award the palm to him among all his contemporaries, and only Franz Schubert, had he lived, would have been worthy to award Mendelssohn that palm without disputing it.” The E flat major Quartet Op.44 No.3 was completed in February 1848. The first movement opens with a terse five-note motif and a dotted rhythm. Both these ideas – and the way Mendelssohn uses them to propel the musical argument – show the influence of Beethoven, and they are contrasted with a more lyrical theme. The energy of this movement, and the elegance of its construction, continue into the second movement: a typical Mendelssohn Scherzo, full of dramatic contrasts between loud and soft. After E flat major in the first movement, and the darker C minor in the Scherzo, the rapt, lyrical Adagio is in A flat major. The finale, back in the home key of E flat, is dazzling, full of rapid semiquavers – a virtuoso display written for some of the most gifted quartet players of the time.  

Nigel Simeone © 2012 

MENDELSSOHN Felix, Octet Op. 20

One of the marvels of nineteenth-century chamber music, Mendelssohn’s Octet was originally finished in October 1825, when the composer was 16 years old. He later revised it before publication. The miracle of this work is not the youthfulness of its creator but the astonishing individuality of its music – regardless of how old its composer was at the time. The arching opening theme of the first movement, underpinned by syncopated chords, reveals the originality of Mendelssohn’s creative voice as never before. The way in which he generates a constant stream of musical ideas is all his own, but this was a composer who knew how to draw on the refinement of Mozart, the power of Beethoven and the contrapuntal intricacy of Bach for his own expressive purposes. The slow movement begins gently but becomes increasingly uneasy, while the dizzying Scherzo was inspired by the ‘Walpurgisnacht’ scene from Goethe’s Faust. The Presto finale follows naturally from this, beginning with an energetic fugal subject that generates unstoppable momentum and inspired elation.  

Nigel Simeone © 2015

BACH FOR SOLO VIOLIN

Ensemble 360

Upper Chapel, Sheffield
Friday 4 October 2024, 1.00pm / 7.00pm

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

Past Event
Classical violinist Benjamin Nabarro from Ensemble 360

JS BACH 
   Sonata No. 1 in G minor (18’)
   Partita No. 1 in B minor (28’)

Benjamin Nabarro performs the first in a new series of concerts celebrating JS Bach’s much-loved music for solo violin. Centred on the intricate and expansive partitas and sonatas, Ben’s recitals explore the wonder of Bach through some of the most enduring and joyous works ever written for the violin. The pieces are presented together with a short, informal conversation about Bach’s celebrated works between Benjamin Nabarro and Benjamin Tassie, Music in the Round’s Programme Manager for Sheffield.

View the brochure online here or download it below.

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BACH J.S., Sonata No.1 for solo violin, BWV 1001

On Bach’s autograph fair copy of the Sonatas and Partitas he calls them ‘Six Solos for violin without bass accompaniment’. They were completed in 1720, the date Bach added beneath his signature on the title page, though it is likely that he had been working on them before then. These magnificent pieces stand as one of the greatest monuments of Baroque instrumental music, but it is worth considering some of the precursors that might have inspired him – all works with which Bach was almost certainly familiar. First, a suite for solo violin without bass and a set of six partitas by Johann Paul von Westhoff (1656–1705), the movements based on dance forms, making extensive use of ‘multiple-stops’ (playing more than one string at the same time) to create the illusion of a solo instrument in dialogue with itself. Westhoff spent his last few years as a violinist at the court in Weimar where Bach met him in 1703, and this encounter may well have given Bach the idea of trying something similar. The unaccompanied Passacaglia which Heinrich Biber (1644–1704) composed as an epilogue to his Rosary Sonatas in about 1676 could well have provided a model (particularly for the Chaconne of the D minor Partita), and Biber’s pupil Johann Joseph Vilsmaÿr (1663–1722) published a set of Six Partitas for solo violin in 1715. In 1717, Vivaldi’s pupil Johann Georg Pisendel (1687–1755) showed Bach his Sonata for solo violin without bass – and later performed Bach’s sonatas and partitas.

The overall design of Bach’s Six Solos alternates Sonatas with Partitas. Each Sonata is in four movements, with a slow opening movement followed by a faster fugue. The finales are characterised by fast, continuous writing full of the kind of kinetic energy that fuels so much of Bach’s music. The third movements are more varied – and each is in a different key from the rest of the sonata. In the First Sonata (in G minor), Bach’s third movement is a gently lilting Siciliano in B flat major. But some of Bach’s most innovative writing in this work is to be found in the fugue (second movement), a marvel of ingenuity which demands from the player a combination of virtuosity and musical insight: Bach was writing here for extremely skilled musicians and may have played the Sonata and Partitas himself (he was a fine violinist as well as a superb keyboard player). There’s a brilliant kind of musical conjuring trick involved in the fugue: the violin is essentially a melodic instrument intended to play a single line, but here, through the use of double-stops and incredibly ingenious part-writing, Bach presents two or more musical lines at once. The result is a compositional sleight of hand with the violin functioning as more than one part, sometimes supported by bass lines that it also supplies itself. The G minor Sonata demonstrates Bach’s ability to create music of the greatest imagination within quite a strict, formal structure: at its most expressive in the first and third movements (Adagio and Siciliana), at its most technically brilliant (and demanding) in the fugue, and at its most energetic and direct in the Presto finale.

Nigel Simeone © 2024 

BARTÓK Béla, Sonata for solo violin

Written for the renowned violinist Yehudi Menuhin, Hungarian composer Béla Bartók’s (1881-1945) Sonata for Solo Violin is widely considered one of the most challenging and expressive works for the instrument. It sits well in this programme, inspired, as it was, by Menhuin’s performance of Bach’s solo violin sonatas. Indeed, Bartók blends elements of the Baroque – the striking triple- and quadruple ‘stops’ of the opening, for example, in which the violinist plays three or four notes simultaneously – with the composer’s signature folk-inspired melodies; angular, sometimes discordant tunes drawn from the folk traditions of Eastern Europe, for which he is perhaps best known. The Sonata is in four movements: the intense and lyrical Tempo di ciaccona, the haunting Fuga, the delicate Melodia, and the virtuosic Presto. Each movement explores the violin’s capabilities, demanding both technical mastery and profound musicality.

BACH J.S., Partita No.1 for solo violin, BWV 1002

The Partitas are very different in terms of their structures. While each is, broadly speaking, a suite of dances, Bach treats this idea with considerable freedom. The First Partita presents four dances – Allemanda, Corrente, Sarabande and Tempo di borea (i.e. Bourée) – but each of them is followed by a ‘Double’, a kind of variation which Bach uses either to create contrast (as in the Allemanda and Corrente) or to intensify a particular mood, something he does to memorable effect in the Sarabande and its ‘double’, or to create still greater musical momentum, as in the Tempo di borea and its double.  

After Bach’s death, a few expert performers continued to play the Sonatas and Partitas from manuscript copies, notably Haydn’s friend Johann Peter Salomon. The whole collection was published for the first time in 1802. In the nineteenth century, Mendelssohn and Schumann both felt the need to ‘enhance’ Bach’s original by adding piano accompaniments. Joseph Joachim was perhaps the first great virtuoso since Salomon to present Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas in concerts, and even in the recording studio (some extraordinarily evocative records from 1903). Thanks to Joachim’s efforts and those of his successors such as Georges Enescu, the Sonatas and Partitas finally came to be recognised as creative pinnacles of the violin repertoire. 

Nigel Simeone © 2024 

CHOPIN FOR SOLO PIANO

Tim Horton

Upper Chapel, Sheffield
Saturday 6 April 2024, 7.00pm

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

Past Event
Pianist Tim Horton

CHOPIN     
Polonaise in F sharp minor Op.44 (10’)
Waltz in A flat Op.42 (4’)
Three Mazurkas Op.56 (12’)
Nocturne in B Op.62 No.1 (7’)
Barcarolle in F sharp Op.60 (8’)
Polonaise in C minor Op.40 No.2 (9’)
Three Waltzes Op.64 (8’)
Impromptu No.2 in F sharp Op.36 (6’)
Nocturne in E Op.62 No.2 (5’)
Andante Spianato and Grand Polonaise brillante Op.22 (14’) 

Tim Horton’s series focusing on Chopin reaches a spectacular conclusion with a sequence of the composer’s works that confirm his music as some of the finest ever written for the piano. Tim will be our guide through Chopin’s powerful Polish mazurkas and polonaises, atmospheric nocturnes and whirling waltzes, including the ever-popular ‘Minute Waltz’. To send us off into the spring evening, Tim will play the Andante Spianato and Grand Polonaise brillante, a perfect summary of Chopin’s genius that pairs beauty with thrilling virtuosity. 

Includes free post-concert Q&A 

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CHOPIN Frédéric, Polonaise in F sharp minor Op.44

Chopin’s ability to reimagine traditional dance forms in the most startling ways is nowhere more apparent than in the Polonaise in F sharp minor, Op.44. Beginning with a mysterious and sinister opening phrase, the main polonaise theme emerges with music that is marked by a kind of restless rage. At the centre of the piece there is relief in the form of a tender mazurka, but the polonaise returns as fierce as ever until it seems to collapse, exhausted, rousing itself for the brutal final bare octaves. After finishing the work in 1841, Chopin wrote to his publisher to announce that ‘I have a manuscript for your disposal. It is a kind of fantasy in polonaise form. But I call it a Polonaise.’ 

 

© Nigel Simeone 

CHOPIN Frédéric, Waltz in A flat Op.42

The Waltz in A flat, Op.42, was written in 1840. Wilhelm von Lenz recalled Chopin playing it: ‘The waltz, springing from the eight-bar trill, should evoke a musical clock, according to Chopin himself. In his own performances … he would play it as a continuous stretto prestissimo with the bass maintaining a steady beat – a garland of flowers winding amidst the dancing couples!’ 

 

© Nigel Simeone

CHOPIN Frédéric, Three Mazurkas Op.56

The mazurka was the Polish dance form Chopin chose for some of his most experimental pieces, combining nostalgia with innovation. The set of Three Mazurkas Op.56 was published in 1844. The B major mazurka begins with a restless theme in the left hand, answered with more confidence by the right hand. There are two contrasting sections (in different keys, E flat and G) before the last return of the opening idea brings resolution. The C major mazurka is boisterous and rustic, with bare open fifths in the bass and a theme full of Polish inflections. The third mazurka has been described as a kind of ‘dance poem’: the musical elements of the mazurka are pared down to produce something which one commentator described as ‘the music of memories rather than of reality’ while another saw its audacious harmonies as providing ‘the foundations for the music of the future.’ 

CHOPIN Frédéric, Nocturne in B Op.62 No.1

The Two Nocturnes published as Op. 62 were composed in 1845–6. The song-like main theme of the B major Nocturne frames a central section (marked sostenuto) and when it is reprised Chopin adds decorations in the manner of an operatic aria – reflecting his admiration for Bellini’s operasThe E major Nocturne was Chopin’s farewell to the form and while it has moments of agitation, the main feeling is of quiet nobility. 

 

© Nigel Simeone

CHOPIN Frédéric, Barcarolle in F sharp Op.60

The Barcarolle in F sharp, Op.60 was written in the summer of 1845. Chopin never went to Venice to hear an authentic barcarolle, but inspiration may have come from Mendelssohn’s Venetian Gondola Song which Chopin used to give his pupils to play. Described by the German musicologist Hugo Leichtentritt as ‘a work of bewildering beauty’, it was taken up by Chopin’s near-contemporaries such as Clara Schumann and Hans von Bülow. Carl Tausig – a Liszt pupil – even invented a fanciful programme for it in which two lovers met secretly in a gondola. Chopin’s wonderful exploration of piano colours and sonorities in the Barcarolle had a powerful appeal for later composers: Ravel described it as ‘magical’ while Olivier Messiaen declared that its rich and resonant piano writing influenced his own music – a century after Chopin. 

 

© Nigel Simeone

CHOPIN Frédéric, Polonaise in C minor Op.40 No.2

The Polonaise in C minor, Op. 40 No. 2 was completed in 1839 and is another work in this form which explores the darker side of Chopin’s musical character. Its mood was well summarised over a century ago by the Chopin scholar Ferdinand Hoesick who described it as ‘gloomy’ with a ‘tragic loftiness’. Chopin dedicated it to his friend Julian Fontana.  

 

© Nigel Simeone

CHOPIN Frédéric, Three Waltzes Op.64

Chopin’s Three Waltzes, Op.64 were composed in 1846–7. The first of them, the so-called ‘Minute’ Waltz’, looks back to Chopin’s earlier ‘brilliant’ style and was said by one contemporary to be a musical portrait of its dedicatee, Chopin’s friend and pupil Delfina Potocka. The second, in C sharp minor, is an exquisite miniature combining intimacy and melancholy in the most concise, unsentimental way. The last of the Op.64 waltzes is more enigmatic: its moods shifting uneasily at times, but finding repose in the central Trio. 

 

© Nigel Simeone

CHOPIN Frédéric, Impromptu No.2 in F sharp Op.36

Like the earlier Barcarolle, the Impromptu Op.36 is in the key of F sharp major. Written in 1839, it combines elements of favourite Chopin forms such as the nocturne and ballade to create a freer and more improvisatory work where wonderment and heroism sit side-by-side. 

 

© Nigel Simeone

CHOPIN Frédéric, Nocturne in E Op.62 No.2

Marked Lento sostenuto, this Nocturne (composed in 1846) is in E major and opens with a long-breathed melody – lyrical but never sentimental – and this is contrasted with a much more turbulent middle section. By this late stage in his career, Chopin had complete mastery of his preferred forms, and this Nocturne – the last to be published during his lifetime – is a beautifully balanced structure which perfectly suits the changing moods of the music, and Chopin’s careful control of emotion: this is music that never wears its heart on its sleeve, but which seems, instead, to be a noble contemplation.

 

Nigel Simeone

CHOPIN Frédéric, Andante Spianato and Grand Polonaise brillante Op.22

The Andante spianato and Grande Polonaise brillante began as the polonaise alone, composed in 1831. Chopin added the Andante spianato in 1834 and the combined work was published in 1836, in versions for piano solo or with orchestral accompaniment. The two sections complement each other: the Andante rippling gently and the Polonaise bursting into exuberant life. 

 

© Nigel Simeone

“Tim Horton’s unaffected, heartfelt playing is perfectly judged.”

The Arts Desk

DVOŘÁK FOR STRINGS

Ensemble 360

Upper Chapel, Sheffield
Thursday 4 April 2024, 7.00pm

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

Past Event

BRITTEN Three Divertimenti for String Quartet (12’)
DVOŘÁK Quartet No.11 in C Op.61 (39’)
DVOŘÁK String Quintet No.2 in G, Op.77 (35’) 

Dvořák’s exceptional and unusually scored String Quintet No.2 is operatic in scope and richly textured, earning the dedication ‘For my country’ from the Czech composer, who yearned to create a distinctly bohemian musical language in a time of turmoil across eastern Europe. His celebrated Quartet No.11 features the thrilling, turbulent writing that has placed him at the heart of the chamber music repertoire.  

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BRITTEN Benjamin, Three Divertimenti for String Quartet

Britten planned these movements as part of a five-movement Quartetto serioso with a subtitle from Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale: “Go play, boy, play!” An earlier version of the opening March was written for a suite inspired by the film Emil and the Detectives (the children’s novel by Erich Kästner was a great favourite of Britten’s), but this was never completed. Eventually he settled on a work in three movements, and the first performance was given by the Stratton Quartet at the Wigmore Hall on 25 February 1936. The audience response was chilly and a hurt Britten withdrew the Three Divertimenti, which were only published after his death. His brilliant gift for idiomatic quartet writing is already apparent in this early work – from the arresting rhythms and textures of the March to the beguiling central Waltz, and the driving energy of the closing Burlesque.

 

© Nigel Simeone

DVOŘÁK Antonin, Quartet No.11 in C Op.61

In 1881, the Viennese violinist Joseph Hellmesberger asked Dvořák to write a new work for his quartet. In October, while working on the opera Dimitrij, Dvořák was alarmed to read an announcement in the Viennese press that the first performance of this quartet would be given on 15 December. He wrote to a friend on 5 November: ‘It still doesn’t exist! … I now have three movements prepared and am working on the finale.’ In fact, Dvořák had no reason to panic: he worked quickly and the C major quartet was written between 25 October and 10 November 1881. 

 

It has fewer overtly Slavonic elements than its immediate predecessor (the E flat Quartet, Op.51), and, perhaps in a nod to Hellmesberger’s commission, the main influences are from Viennese masters: Beethoven and, especially, Schubert. The spacious first movement transforms its two main themes with great ingenuity and harmonic imagination. The Adagio opens with a fervent theme presented as an intimate dialogue between the two violins; its second idea has what Dvořák’s biographer Otakar Šourek described as a ‘veiled expression of melancholy’. The influence of Beethoven is most apparent in the rather terse Scherzo while the falling theme of the central Trio provides a delightful contrast. The finale (a sonata-rondo) brings the work to a joyous conclusion, with Dvořák at his most inimitably Czech. 

 

After all the rush, Hellmesberger’s advertised December premiere in Vienna had to be cancelled due to a catastrophic fire at the Ringtheater, and the earliest known performance was given by Joseph Joachim’s quartet on 2 November 1882 in Berlin. 

 

© Nigel Simeone

DVOŘÁK Antonin, String Quintet No.2 in G, Op.77

Scored for the unusual combination of string quartet and double bass, Dvořák’s String Quintet in G major was first performed on 18 March 1876 as the composer’s Op.18 – a number that was changed when the work was first published by Simrock twelve years later in 1888. Originally the work had five movements (with an ‘Intermezzo’ before the Scherzo, reworked as the Nocturne in B major for string orchestra), and despite the published opus number, it is one of the composer’s first chamber works to be fully characteristic of his mature style. The first movement opens with a motif played first by the viola (Dvořák’s own instrument) that dominates much of the musical argument – the triplet figure in it is to be heard in the second theme too. The Scherzo finds Dvořák writing in the style of a folk dance, the opening theme consists of a lively opening motif that contrasts with a gentler idea over which Dvořák later introduces a warmly expressive new tune. The third movement has been described by the great Dvořák scholar Otakar Šourek as ‘one of the most entrancing slow movements in the whole of Dvořák’s chamber music … a flowing stream of passionate warmth [and] depth of feeling’. The finale has the same kind of sunny mood as the first movement, but with an even greater sense of joyful energy. Though there are moments of repose (during which the thematic material is treated to some ingenious transformations), the work ends with what Dvořák’s biographer Otakar Šourek aptly described as ‘high-spirited verve’.  

 

© Nigel Simeone