Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Event Details

Ian Munro charmed Australia Ensemble audience members with his Divertissement sur le nom d’Erik Satie, a very sympathetic musical portrait of the Paris-based composer of the famous Gymnopédies, written for piano and string quartet. Now he has come back with a new version of the piece scored for piano and wind, one guaranteed to make Satie’s durable blending of oddity and originality come to life with additional incisiveness.

While Satie’s nineteenth century explorations of harmony and texture were helping a major French contemporary, Ravel, to find his way to a personal style in which astringency and clarity were in balance, the Viennese-based composer Arnold Schoenberg expressed a more hectic, urgent and explosive view of music’s destiny in his Chamber Symphony Opus 9. Composed in 1906 when Schoenberg was still writing as a late Romantic composer and long before his development of a special way of escaping from tonality this is an outstandingly exuberant piece. Schoenberg’s wholly loyal pupil, Anton Webern, arranged Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony for two woodwind, two strings and piano, making sure that it would have frequent outings in chamber-sized concerts.

Mozart’s G minor String Quintet K516 is one of the miracles of music, combining Mozartian themes of the utmost memorability with the thrust and tug of eloquent counterpoint in a manner inclined to stir a listener’s dizziest pleasure. Not heard in the Australia Ensemble’s programs for many years, this masterwork promises thematic fire and agreements of immaculate bliss.

Featured non-Australian music: Schoenberg, Mozart

Further information for this event is available online at the event's website

Featured Australian Works

Featured artists

• Performer Australia Ensemble