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

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

Miniatures : New works in celebration of the 30th Season of the Australia Ensemble by leading Australian composers Matthew Hindson, Andrew Ford, Peter Sculthorpe, Martin Wesley-Smith, Elena Kats-Chernin, Ross Edwards and Raffaele Marcellino - 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.

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.