Australia Ensemble Season Opener
The Australia Ensemble will begin its 2020 season with a powerful program, Storm and Tempest. Performing with guest artists, the ensemble will explore the tumult of stormy weather, tempestuous emotion, and the promise of new things rising from the ruins of the old.
Australian composer Elena Kats-Chernin channels a revolutionary spirit and the anarchy of shifts of power in Eastern Europe following the fall of the Berlin Wall. The music of Austrian composer Franz Schreker, after decades spent in obscurity, has begun to enjoy a considerable revival. His work ‘The Wind’ originally included dancers to enhance the aural depiction of this wiled and varied force of nature. Franz Berwald, a Swedish Romantic composer, made his living as an orthopedic surgeon and later as the manager of a sawmill and glass factory. Now, nearly a century and a half after his death, he has been hailed by critics all over the world as a great Swedish composer. Finally, Ludwig van Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 29, known as ‘Storm’, was written as he become aware of his deafness – a curse which caused immense emotional distress. This strangely neglected masterpiece is Janus-headed, at once retrospective and prophetic.
Storm and Tempest: Elena KATS-CHERNIN | Velvet Revolution (1999)/Ludwig van BEETHOVEN | String Quintet Op.29 ‘Storm’ (1801)/
Franz SCHREKER | Der Wind (1909)/ Franz BERWALD | Grand Septet in B flat (1828)
The performers: David Griffiths, clarinet; Dene Olding, violin; Dimity Hall, violin; Irina Morozova, viola; Julian Smiles, cello; and Ian Munro, piano with guest artists Carla Blackwood, horn; Tobias Breider, viola; Lyndon Watts, bassoon; and Andrew Meisel, double bass
Tickets: Adult $56 | Senior $43 | Concession $34 On Sale Saturday 1 February 2020
