• 
• 

Twenty-eight musical candidates for your lasting delight

From the Artistic Chair, twenty-eight musical candidates for your lasting delight. A quick count confirms that there are no fewer than fourteen nationalities represented by the composers of the music programmed by the Australia Ensemble @UNSW for its Saturday night series in 2013. Some countries, the original sources of chamber music as we know it, make their usual good showing in our tally of musical origins but there is space and time, too, for music from a long list of other traditions and places. The major creative anniversaries in music of 2013 are led by two opera composers of supreme rank, Verdi and Wagner, whose work has very little to do with chamber music. Verdi, however, wrote a single String Quartet (in E minor) – it forms part of our March program - while expressing his doubts that it was quite the right thing for an Italian composer to do. He need not have doubted his versatility or the fact that he continues to sound like Verdi. Benjamin Britten is a successor to these giants as the leading international opera composer of the second half of the twentieth century but is also, like Mozart, a memorable contributor to many other musical genres, including chamber music. Our celebration of the 100th anniversary of his birth on the salty east coast of England includes performances of his extraordinarily eloquent and shapely first String Quartet and the awesomely assured Sinfonietta for ten instruments that helped launch his professional career.   Read more

---