Music Chamber

Roxana Rumney (violin) Dominic John (piano) play:

 

Giuseppe Tartini "Devil's Trill " Sonata in G minor

Larghetto affetuoso, Tempo giusto della Scuola Tartinista, Andante

 

Edvard Grieg Sonata No. 3 in C minor, op 45

Allegro molto ed appassionato, Allegretto espressivo alla Romanza, Allegro animato

 

Pablo de Sarasate Caprice Basque op 24

Moderato. Allegro Moderato

 

As a child Roxana Rumney performed in concert tours all over Europe with the London Suzuki Group, then in its infancy. She attended Pimlico School as a member of the specialist music department, and took lessons with Bela Katona and with his wife Eszter Boda, at Trinity College of Music. She took summer schools in Israel directed by Itzhak Rashkovsky, and studied under him in London. After Trinity, she did a postgraduate course at the Guildhall designed to broaden the outlook of the music graduate while giving something back to the community. The Guildhall Ensemble presented new compositions, performed theatre pieces and ran projects in schools. After the course, Roxana organised her own series of concerts in hospitals and care homes for the elderly. Her professional career has been a combination of teaching and performing, having played with various chamber groups and orchestras, including the Scottish BBC Symphony. On becoming a mother and instantly knowing she would want her children to be Suzuki students, she herself trained as a Suzuki teacher and now has her own teaching practice. In the last few years she has rededicated herself to the violin giving regular performances, most recently at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich. Roxana’s violin is 18th Century Genovese. Dominic John studied at the Junior Royal Academy of Music under Patsy Toh. He continued his studies at the Royal College of Music with John Barstow and Andrew Ball, where he held the RCM Society Junior Fellowship from 2004-2006. A versatile musician, Dominic is an active soloist, member of various chamber ensembles and accompanist to a wide variety of singers and instrumentalists. Performances in this country include the Wigmore Hall and the Barbican Hall. He has won several prizes including First Prize in the 22nd Brant International Piano Competition, the prestigious Chappell Gold Medal of the RCM, a Director's Golden Jubilee Award at the RCM, 2004 British Music Society Awards, 2004 Eastbourne Symphony Orchestra Young Soloist Competition and 4th Prize in the 2005 Corpus Christi, U.S.A. International Competition for Piano and Strings. He has given Concerto performances of the Beethoven "Emperor", Grieg, Liszt No.1, Gershwin Rhapsody in Blue, Rachmaninov 3rd and Prokofiev 2nd. Of particular note was a performance with Itzhak Perlman at an evening soirée and performances of  Tchaikovsky Concerto and Saint-Saens "Carnival of the Animals" with the Osaka Philharmonic in Symphony Hall, Osaka. Dominic is a staff accompanist at the Junior Department, Royal Academy of Music.

 

After two years as conductor and music director of Bergen’s Harmonien Music Society, Edvard Grieg retired from that post in 1882 to devote himself fully to composition and touring, and to preserving his always frail health. In 1886, Grieg was inspired by a visit of the Italian violinist Teresina Tua to Troldhaugen, his home near Bergen. Though not yet twenty, Teresina had already established her reputation with a brilliantly successful European tour and an acclaimed appearance at London’s Crystal Palace; when she stopped in Norway to see Grieg, she was on her way to tour America. Teresina withdrew from the concert stage following her marriage in 1889, but she again started performing in 1895; some of her most successful appearances thereafter were with Rachmaninoff in Russia. She was widowed in 1911, remarried two years later, and taught for a while in Milan and Rome, but she ultimately abandoned both the world and her career, and lived out her last days in a convent in Rome, where she died in 1955. Grieg was charmed by this attractive young virtuoso – “the little fiddle-fairy on my troll-hill,” he called her – and said that it would be entirely due to her if he were “again to perpetrate something for the violin.” Teresina’s impression must have been strong on the 43-year-old composer, because immediately after her departure, Grieg began his Violin Sonata No. 3 in C minor, his first venture in that genre in twenty years. The piece was completed early the next year, and premiered at the Leipzig Gewandhaus on December 10, 1887 by Grieg and the celebrated Russian violinist Adolf Brodsky. The Sonata found favor at its first performance, and it has remained one of Grieg’s most popular chamber compositions.