Music Chamber

 

 

Mansoon Bow began studying the violin in her native city of Osaka. Later she proceeded to the Royal Academy of Music in London on a Derek Butler Scholarship, the Bratton Scholarship and Leverhulme Scholarship. Mansoon has been awarded prestigious prizes in the Osaka International competition 2000, Classic competition, Soloist competition and David Martin/Florence concerto Prize at the Royal Academy of Music where she was also a recipient of the Poulett Scholarship and the Bloch Award.  In 2008, Mansoon won the First Prize and the Audience Prize in The Cavatina Music Competition and most recently, she has been chosen to receive the Byram Jeejeebhoy Prize as well as the Silver Medal Prize which is awarded to students who has made the most outstanding contribution to the work and to performance activities.

 

Sam Liu lived with his family in British Columbia until he was accepted in Trinity College of Music and moved to London as international student at 2007.  Sam earned his ARCT diploma in Canada and is finishing the BMus course at Trinity College of Music. In 2009 Sam won the "Il Circolo" Competition held by the College at the Italian Cultural Centre.

 

Programme Note:

 

It was Robert Schumann's practice when composing to concentrate intensively on a particular genre. During the period 1849-1851 he composed mostly lyrical character pieces, which he usually bundled in cycles.  In each of these works, a then-neglected instrument shines in a duet with piano (horn, oboe, clarinet, viola, cello). The violin-piano combination received Schumann’s attention in 1851. After the first rehearsal on October 16, his wife Clara wrote, “We played it and felt especially moved by the most elegiac first movement as well as by the lovely second one.  Only the third movement, which is somewhat less charming and more headstrong, we just did not seem to get right.” In his autobiography, Wasielewski (concertmaster of the Düsseldorf orchestra) remembers that “only the Finale I couldn't play to his (Schumann's) satisfaction. We went through it three more times, but Schumann said that he had expected a different effect from the violin. I was unable to convey sufficiently the headstrong, gruff tone of the piece...” Schumann allegedly said to Wasielewski about his first violin sonata, “I wrote it right after I had gotten upset with a couple of people.” This was a reference to the mounting tension between the Schumanns and the Düsseldorfer Musikverein, which wanted to fire Schumann as a conductor. Neither the performance by Clara Schumann and the violinist Ferdinand David in the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, nor the publication of the first edition, both in March 1852, was a success. This setback was made even worse because it became the specific reason why the Leipzig publisher Hofmeister declined to publish Schumann's cello concerto.  Only in May 1853 did the young violinist Joseph Joachim leave an unforgettable impression with his brilliant interpretation of this work. With his two violin sonatas, Schumann, more than Beethoven or Schubert, supplied the model for the great violin sonatas of the second half of the nineteenth century. Themes from the three movements are related through similar intervals, or “germ cells.”  Indeed, the first theme of movement one returns as a fleeting memory in movement three.  This cyclic idea, later systematically cultivated by French composer César Franck, was not new in Schumann’s music: he had already applied the cyclic principle in his Piano Sonata, op. 14 (Concert sans orchestre), and it can also be traced in masterpieces such as his Piano Concerto and the Fourth Symphony. The second movement serves as an enchanting intermezzo that incorporates elements of a missing Scherzo.  It is a precursor of the second movement, Andante tranquillo, of Brahms’s A Major Violin Sonata, op. 100. The Finale is a demonic perpetuum mobile that, in its use of canonic style, reflects Schumann's intensive study of Bach's work. Schumann was, together with Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, one of the first great German artists to be fully aware of the “incommensurable” (to quote from Schumann) geniality of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music.  In compositions such as Kreisleriana and the Toccata, the influence of Bach cannot be overestimated. Contrapuntal techniques, such as the canon, are central to understanding Schumann’s world of “inner voices,” and are never used pedantically, but as the most natural and romantic expression. In later years, when the violin sonatas were written, Schumann was overwhelmed by young Joseph Joachim’s violin playing.  The influence of a piece such as J.S. Bach’s D-Minor Ciaccona for solo violin on his own music cannot be overemphasized. Note also the Bachian influence in the opening movement of his second violin sonata, the violin concerto, and the Concertstück for piano and orchestra, op. 134.