Concerts

callino
DateOct 20 2010, 7:30 PM
TitleMosaic Ensemble Wind & Strings
LocationSt. John's Church Notting Hill, W11 3DJ
ArtistMosaic Ensemble

Mosaic Ensemble (Anna Turmeau oboe, Naomi Bristow clarinet, Andrew Watson bassoon, Lucy Gallantine horn, Rosie Moon double bass, Amanda Izzo flute, Mireia Ferrer violin, Shelagh McKail viola, Michael Wigram cello) perform: 

  • Bohuslav Martinu (1890-1959):            Nonet
  • Poco Allegro ~ Andante ~ Allegretto
  • Sir Arthur Bliss (1891-1975):                Conversations
    The Committee Meeting
    In the Wood
    In the Ballroom
    Soliloquy
    In the Tube at Oxford Circus
  • Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827):  Septet in E flat Op 20
    Adagio; Allegro con brio
    Adagio cantabile
    Tempo di minuetto
    Tema con variazioni: Andante
    Scherzo: Allegro molto e vivace
    Andante con moto alla marcia; Presto

Mosaic Ensemble was formed in 2009 by a group of exceptional young musicians who met as members of Southbank Sinfonia, Britain’s young professional orchestra. Members of the ensemble have performed chamber works together as part of the Royal Opera House lunchtime chamber music series and at the Anghiari Festival in Tuscany. They formed to explore the expansive repertoire for mixed wind and strings. Members of Mosaic Ensemble have worked with orchestras including Ulster Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, London Philharmonic Orchestra and BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.

Martinu came to America in 1941 to escape the Nazi occupation of Paris, and though he longed for his homeland, he and his music were enthusiastically received.  He was prolific, composing music in all forms. The Nonet was composed in 1959, and premiered at the Salzburg Festival by the Czech Nonet to whom it was dedicated, a month before the composer's death. The Nonet was inspired by the music and musicians of the Czech countryside, particularly Bohemia and Moravia. Its other influence was the music of Haydn which Martinu studied and grew to love during his stay in America. Despite being composed so near the time of his death, the Nonet is optimistic, life-affirming music.
 
Conversations represents a new phase in Bliss’s career. In Paris after the war he had met the group of young composers loosely banded together as Les Six, and Conversations was later played at the Aeolian Hall in London in a programme that included works by Germaine Tailleferre, Poulenc and Milhaud, to be greeted by the severe strictures of the critic of the Daily Mail. The work was originally intended as a jeu d’esprit, given in a private performance by five musicians of some distinction, including the flautist Gordon Walker and the oboist Leon Goossens. The first movement, The Committee Meeting, finds the chairman, the violin, in a monotonous mezzo-forte, struggling to make his point, against the often irrelevant interruptions of others, in obvious dissent. In the Wood is gently nostalgic in character, with its intermittent bird-song, a contrast to the following In the Ballroom, with its jaunty violin melody first heard over the plucked notes of viola and cello, before the entry of the bass flute. At the heart of the movement, in which the oboe is silent, is a more sinister passage, introduced by the bass flute. The fourth movement is Soliloquy for cor anglais alone, the first section, which is repeated, frames a livelier central section. Conversations ends with In the Tube at Oxford Circus, a playful evocation of the turmoil and varying scene, the whole work a contemporary reaction to the preceding decade, but no longer as shocking as it seemed to some contemporaries.
 
Beethoven composed his Septet in 1799-1800, as he entered his thirtieth year. He had taken the Viennese by storm with his skill at keyboard improvisation, had produced his first two piano concertos, and was about to begin work on his First Symphony. The Septet brought to a conclusion his first big series of chamber music compositions, which by then included four piano trios, five works for string trio, and the pairs of compositions for wind octet and for two oboes and English horn, as well as the six string quartets of Op. 18. The Septet, dedicated to the Empress Maria Theresia (not the famous monarch, who had died twenty years earlier, but the wife of the Emperor Franz), became his most popular work in any form and so remained for some time. In later life Beethoven remarked that he wished it had been burned, and when a would-be patron, after the premiere of the Eighth Symphony, offered him a handsome fee to compose "something in the more agreeable style of the Septet" he expressed proper outrage. Spohr, Hummel and others did continue to compose works on this model, though, and without it we might not have had the masterly Octet of Schubert's maturity (in his case, about the same age as Beethoven at the time he composed his Septet), a work whose depth and proportions might be said to have kept pace with Beethoven's own progress after this last big gesture in the "more agreeable style" of the eighteenth century. The six-movement layout here is more or less that of the classic divertimento, but, as Heinz Becker observed several decades ago, "the music seems to have left the superficial virtuosity of earlier divertimenti behind, and to have moved to the warmer region of symphonic thought." All six movements are too straightforward to require analysis, but it may be noted that the third movement, always the most popular section of the work, is an adaptation of the minuet in Beethoven's Piano Sonata in G major, Op. 49, No. 2 (a work composed much earlier than its misleading opus number might suggest), and that the theme of the splendid set of variations that constitutes the fourth movement became one of the several Beethoven melodies adapted for use as songs by other musicians.
share

Listen