Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Event Details

"A work whose perfectly achieved mastery is all the more remarkable for being so consistently understated." So wrote the highly respected musicologist and author Malcolm MacDonald of Brahms’ A Major Piano Quartet. Quintessentially classical in conception and owing a great debt to the music of Schubert, the quartet is a masterpiece of sustained symphonic argument and majestic lyricism.

Mikhail Glinka is widely regarded as the father of Russian classical music, but it was the ideologically aligned “Mighty Handful” of Mily Balakirev, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky and Alexander Borodin who firmly established a distinctly Russian style of music. In his groundbreaking new work inspired by the poetry of Pushkin and composed for the Australia Piano Quartet, Sydney Chamber Opera director Jack Symonds reimagines and unites romances by these five Russian masters in a compelling outpouring of song, Your Cruel Melodies.

Leading Australian tenor, Andrew Goodwin, is himself a graduate of the renowned St Petersburg Conservatoire named after Rimsky-Korsakov. Steeped in the Russian vocal tradition and possessing a voice that is “clarion-clear with unshakeable reliability” (SMH), Mr Goodwin and the APQ are the ideal match to present this exciting new work.

PROGRAM

JACK SYMONDS - Your Cruel Melodies for Tenor and Piano Quartet (2017 APQ commission)
JOHANNES BRAHMS - Piano Quartet No.2 in A major, Op.26

ARTIST INFORMATION

Rebecca Chan, violin
James Wannan, viola
Thomas Rann, cello
Daniel de Borah, piano

Andrew Goodwin, tenor

Featured non-Australian music: Brahms

Further information for this event is available online at the event's website or by phone on (02) 9250 7777

Featured artists

• New work by Jack Symonds
• Performer Australia Piano Quartet
• Performer Andrew Goodwin