大象传媒

John Toal presents highlights from the 20th West Cork Chamber Music Festival.

Many of the musicians who come to the Festival have established solo careers and it's the combinations of performers into chamber ensembles that makes for an interesting mix. That's evident in today's programme which begins with Alan Boustead's arrangement of Brahms' Serenade in D major Op.11 for 9 instruments.

Brahms was famously nervous about writing a Symphony that would inevitably be compared to Beethoven, and this Serenade in D - written in his 20s - was a stepping stone in that direction. Cast in six movements it follows in a fashion similar large chamber works by Beethoven, Schubert and Mozart, and it's scored for Flute, violin, viola, cello, bass, a pair of clarinets, horn and bassoon.

The programme ends with Anton Webern's yearning Langsamer Satz, translating Short Piece. Written nearly fifty years after the Brahms, this is a Romantic young Webern, before his teacher Schoenberg's ideas of brevity and not writing in a clear key took him in a different direction. Langsamer Satz has been described as a mini-Mahler Symphony.

Brahms: Serenade in D major Op.11 (arr. for nonet by Alan Boustead)
Chlo毛 Hanslip (violin), Maxim Rysanov (viola), David Cohen (cello), Niek de Groot (bass), Philippe Bernold (flute), Romain Guyot & Mathias Kj酶ller (clarinets), Herv茅 Joulain (horn), Peter Whelan (bassoon)

Webern: Langsamer Satz
Cremona Quartet - Cristiano Gualco and Paolo Andreoli (violins), Simone Gramalgia (viola) and Giovanni Scaglione (cello).