Eugene GOOSSENS (1893-1962): Suite for flute, violin & harp (1914)

Toru TAKEMITSU (1930-1996): Quatrain II for clarinet, violin, cello & piano (1977)

Ian MUNRO (b 1963): New comissioned work for flute, clarinet, piano, two violins, viola, cello & percussion (2009)
- first performance

Ludwig BEETHOVEN (1770-1827): String Quartet in E minor Opus 59 No. 2 (1805)

After the Australia Ensemble’s performance in 2008 of Eugene Goossens’s holiday impressions, which used with outstanding skill and freshness the then new vocabularies of Debussy and Ravel, it seemed only right to turn to another Goossens work from the same eve-of-World War I period, his Suite for flute, violin and harp, for more pleasures of a deft and welcoming kind. Toru Takemitsu, a distinguished Japanese composer of a different generation, shares with Goossens an abiding love of Debussy’s style and aesthetic and combines it, in his Quatrain II, with an ultra-sensitive skill in using timbre owing much to his own national traditions. The Ensemble’s resident pianist, Ian Munro, another devotee of French music, has become increasingly familiar to his audiences in the last few years as a composer and arranger, notably in his Divertissement sur le nom d’Erik Satie in the 2007 Saturday night series, and will compose a new piece for Ensemble members in this program. Beethoven’s String Quartet in E minor, the second quartet of the Rasumovsky set and one of the greatest works of European chamber music, ends the concert.