By Felicity Woodhill, founder of Inspire Music Australia
The second concert in the series is filling up fast. Reserving a seat is advisable. Audiences will be allowed in from 10:45am and are welcome to get a cup of tea before they sit down.
Bach and Beyond features 19-year-old violinist Beatrice Colombis, a scholarship student at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music studying with Ass. Prof. Goetz Richter. Beatrice will perform with her mother, Laura McDonald a well-known Sydney pianist and Suzuki teacher.
The program will open with a short selection of cello works performed by local cellist Tom Carolan who is an HSC student at Edmund Rice College. He studies cello at the Wollongong Conservatorium under the tutelage of Tanya Phillips and will be accompanied by Lisa Baraldi.
Fugues in Music and Art
As winner of the 2021 Melbourne Bach Competition Beatrice will open the program with one of Bach’s famous solo violin sonatas, a set of works entitled Sei Solo which translates to “you are alone”. In these compositions Bach explored the capacity of the violin to move beyond a mainly melodic line to represent multiple layers of music.
Listening with one’s eyes closed one could be deceived into thinking that there are several instruments playing. A fascinations with the layering of sound and its impact on the senses inspired painters to translate the concept of musical polyphony, in particular Bach’s fugues, into visual images. Artists engaged in this process included Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), Paul Klee (1876 -1940), Georges Braque (1882-1963). More information about the relationship between these artists and Bach’s music can be read in the Interlude article, Music and Art – homage à Bach.
Chamber Music and Brahms
Beatrice is one of Australia’s leading young chamber musicians, this year she has performed and toured with the Winther Quartet and was awarded the Henderson Travelling Scholarship for her string quartet “Asta” at the Con. In July they travelled to study in Finland, Austria and Germany. Beatrice will perform Brahms Sonata No. 3 for Piano and Violin, a deeply romantic work in which the two performers converse through the music. Like Bach the texture of Brahms is rich with many interwoven lines and like Bach his work inspired visual artists to capture the essence of his work in visual images such as Max Klinger (1857-1920). See Ursula Rehn Wolfman's Music and Art – The Sound of Paintings II in Interlude.
Gypsy Music and Ravel’s Tzigane
The program will conclude with Maurice Ravel’s Tzigane a highly virtuosic gypsy inspired piece written for the Hungarian violinist Jelly d'Arányi (1893–1966), the grandniece of the legendary violinist Joseph Joachim. Ravel was inspired to write the Tzigane after listening to Jelly play gypsy music, almost uninterrupted for an entire night and into the following morning. It also speaks to the fun and virtuosic works being written by composers such as Sarasate.
Entry is free, donations appreciated.
Bookings via Humanitix.
Save the date: October 6, Music from the Heart
This is a program that is bound to delight. Elsa and Sophie are young (11 years old) but their delight and excellence in performance is being nurtured by Sydney Conservatorium of Music lecturer Natalia Ricci. Natalia has also fostered a musical friendship between the girls through encouraging them to regularly perform duets together. In this concert you will hear them perform solo works and pieces for four hands.
