Music is so often a response to love: the pain of a failed affair suffuses Glinka’s unusually scored trio, while Carl Vine’s Strutt Sonata was commissioned to celebrate a long and happy marriage and Elena Kats-Chernin offers deep solace to a suffering child. Beethoven’s celebrated Septet pays loving homage to the fast-fading tradition of 18th-century chamber music for winds.

ARTISTS

David Griffiths, clarinet; Dimity Hall, violin; Julian Smiles, cello; with guest artists Andrea Lam, piano; Carla Blackwood, horn; Andrew Barnes, bassoon; Tahlia Petrosian, viola; and Andrew Meisel, double bass

PROGRAM

Carl VINE | Strutt Sonata (2017) 

Elena KATS-CHERNIN | Blue Silence (2006/2012) 

Mikhail GLINKA | Trio pathétique (1832) 

Ludwig van BEETHOVEN | Septet in E flat Op. 20 (1800) 

Beethoven presented his gracious and poised Septet alongside his First Symphony and First Piano Concerto in 1800 at his first public concert in Vienna, and joked that it was his Creation (despite it being nothing like Haydn’s monumental oratorio!) He would grow peeved that the Septet became one his most popular works, but it was an act of loving homage to the serenade tradition, often featuring woodwinds, that Mozart had cultivated years before. 
Love has fuelled many a musical work: Glinka’s passionate and unusually scored Trio pathétique was written in Italy and into it he poured the knowledge he had gained ‘of love from the pain it caused’. 

Elena Kats-Chernin composed her beautiful Blue Silence as a gift of meditative calm to ease her son’s suffering from schizophrenia. Jacqueline Strutt commissioned Carl Vine’s cello sonata as a gift to her husband John, a work of classical shape and proportions that celebrates the kind of music that this ever-generous couple enjoyed.