FineArts Star pianist, Imogen Cooper (Photo: Sim Canetty-Clarke)
Norfolk & Norwich Chamber Music FineCity arts writer, Tony Cooper, previews the new season of Norfolk & Norwich Chamber Music
A
nd what a season, too, the first to be programmed by NNCM’s new artistic director, Misha Donat, writer, lecturer and senior music producer for BBC Radio 3 for more than 25 years. He has given many radio talks and pre-concert talks at a number of venues in Britain and has lectured at universities here and in the USA. He writes programme notes particularly for the Wigmore Hall and, currently, is working on a new edition of the Beethoven piano sonatas being published by Bärenreiter, the German classical-music publishing house based in Kassel. This is what he had to say: ‘It has given me great pleasure in putting the 2017/18 programme together and I hope that chambermusic aficionados will enjoy not only the music but the internationally-renowned artists that are coming to Norwich to perform it. ‘The core of the chamber-music repertoire is well represented with the complete piano trios of Beethoven as well as no fewer than four of his string quartets and a small handful of 34 | Autumn 2017
works for solo piano. The season also includes Schubert’s last quartet together with his final triptych of piano sonatas and a group of his Lieder as well as Mozart’s sumptuous Serenade for 13 Winds, Mendelssohn’s irresistibly-youthful Octet for strings and Schumann’s Dichterliebe plus one of his late piano trios. ‘Some of the programmes range farther afield. There is, for instance, a healthy sprinkling of music by the Hungarian contingent: Bartók’s Fourth Quartet - perhaps the greatest of the half-dozen he composed - and pieces by the two leading Hungarian composers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, György Kurtág and György Ligeti. Other contemporary composers represented include Wolfgang Rihm and Luciano Berio.’ Altogether, there’s so much to discover during the course of the season which gets underway with a song recital by Mark Padmore the celebrated English tenor who has worked with many of the world’s foremost orchestras, recorded a wide and varied repertory with
major labels and won numerous awards and honours. His concert on Saturday, 30th September, 7.30pm, sees him joining forces with the Austrian pianist, Till Fellner, to perform some of Schubert’s most subtle and hauntinglybeautiful songs including ‘Die Sterne’ in which the twinkling of the stars in the piece is suggested in the delicate repeated notes of the piano part and ‘Das Zugenglöcklein where the tolling of a small bell is evoked by a single note chiming throughout. Mr Padmore’s recital concludes with Schumann’s Dichterliebe (A Poet’s Love), the most heart-breaking and tragic of all his songcycles and the best known. The texts for the 16 songs (composed in 1840) come from the Lyrisches Intermezzo of Heinrich Heine, written 1822-23 and published as part of the poet’s Das Buch der Lieder. Following the songcycles of Schubert - Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise - those of Schumann constitute part of the central core of the genre in musical literature Prague-based Pavel Haas Quartet (Sunday, 8th October, 3.00pm) opens an www.finecity.co.uk