Preview Ensemble 360
The Sheffield ensemble perform music for piano and wind in Halifax
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This concert takes place under the auspices of Halifax Philharmonic Club, now in their 65th year, and features Ensemble 360, now firmly established where The Lindsays once played, with pianist Tim Horton, in a programme of music for Piano and Wind.
It was Mozart who showed the way for this instrumental combination, the ‘K452 Quintet’ now recognised as the first important foray in the medium. It was a work of which he was inordinately proud, and, though he failed to follow it up with a second, it helped spawn Beethoven’s Op. 16 Quintet For Piano And Wind. This was part of an important series of chamber works written as he struggled to complete his first orchestral pieces. As Mozart found, the four wind instruments offer uniquely different voices, contrasting with each other as well as the piano. Yet, despite the myriad sonic possibilities, Beethoven too failed to write a second similar piece. Perhaps, there was not the aristocratic demand.
The major Romantic composers did not take up the challenge either, which promotes the works of lesser writers to programmes such as these. Ludwig Thuille was a Munich school contemporary of Richard Strauss. He even made a two-piano transcript of Strauss’ Don Juan and was a good enough composer to have beaten Zemlinsky into second place in an opera competition in 1897. Thuille’s Sextet for Piano, Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Horn and Bassoon is the piece by which he is now remembered and is full of noble heroics and high spirits, and, though Austrian by birth, there is enough Gallic wit in evidence to highlight the composer’s French ancestry.
Perhaps an unforeseen bonus of the lack of works specifically written for piano and wind is the opportunity to make adaptations of famous concert hall or operatic gems. Two intriguing staples from the French repertoire, Ravel’s sumptuous Mother Goose Suite and Bizet’s Chanson Bohèmienne from Carmen, complete the programme in convincing arrangements by David Walter.
12 March, Square Chapel, 10 Square Road, Halifax, HX1 1GQ, 01422 349 422, 7.30pm, £14.50
Posted on Monday 22nd February 2010
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