Ledra
Music Soloists
3rd
International Chamber Music Festival
Ledra
Music Soloists announces its 3rd annual International
Chamber Music Festival, which will begin on March 24, and conclude on
April 9. Established
artists from Cyprus, Finland, and Hungary, will come together to
perform magnificent works of music to Cypriot audiences.
This year’s festival will exclusively concentrate on the
music of three composers that share anniversaries in the year 2006:
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart [250 from birth], Robert Schumann [150 from
death], and Dmitri Shostakovich [100 from birth].
Extract from Peter Laki’s notes from the programme
of the festival
We
certainly don’t need any anniversaries to play, or hear, the music
of Mozart, Schumann and Shostakovich, who are certainly among the most
prominent composers of their respective centuries.
Yet when an anniversary affords us a chance to hear their works
in higher concentrations and in great performances, it is perhaps time
to reflect on what this music means to us, to develop a more intense
relationship with the masterworks and to feel them more deeply than
before. Mozart, Schumann
and Shostakovich were widely separated by time and place and there are
few obvious similarities or parallels among them.
But who is to say that we’re not going to have some
interesting insights just from this juxtaposition, lending our ears to
some genres that were important to all three – the sonata, the
string quartet or the art song? The
200 years spanned by these three composers are the 200 years that
shaped the modern world we live in and they did their share, to say
the least, to shape it.
Wolfgang Amadeus Theophil
Mozart was born in
Salzburg on January 27, 1756 and died in Vienna on December 5, 1791.
Chamber
music in Mozart’s time was mostly a private affair; most of it was
written to be played at home rather than in public venues. There was an important market for publishing this music for
the enjoyment of the Kenner und Liebhaber (to quote a famous phrase
from one of C.P.E. Bach’s publications, meaning “amateurs and
connoisseurs”).
Dmitri Shostakovich
was born on December 25,
1906, in St. Petersburg, Russia and died of
lung cancer in
Moscow on August 9, 1975.
Shostakovich
wrote most of his chamber music for his friends and for himself (he
was a prodigiously gifted pianist).
Among the composers of the 20th century, there is perhaps no
one for whom communicating with an audience was as important as it was
for Shostakovich. Like
Mozart, Shostakovich took the musical conventions of his time and
moulded them into a uniquely personal language.
Classical sonata form, simple rhythmic patterns from various
folk-music idioms and other devices that had become anathema to his
more radical contemporaries, were what Shostakovich needed in order to
say what he had to say. He
played very subtle games with these conventional devices, setting up
expectations in the listener only to thwart them and do the utterly
unexpected, knowing that an attentive and sympathetic audience would
understand.
Robert Schumann was born in Zwickau, on June 8, 1810 and died
of Syphilis in Endenich asylum on July 29, 1856.
Although
Schumann composed prolifically in the symphonic and dramatic genres,
his heart was in the chamber forms – piano works and chamber music
both instrumental and vocal. It
was there that his genius felt most at home.
To him, chamber music belonged in the private sphere of
Hausmusik which meant a lot to him – but he also had the desire to
send it out into the world in published form.
Through his wife Clara, one of the greatest pianists of the 19th
century, Schumann’s music quickly established itself as one of the
cornerstones of the Western concert repertoire, but not everything is
played with equal frequency and there are still many hidden gems to
discover and to enjoy.
Artists:
Nicolas Costantinou, [piano]
Margarita Elia, [soprano]
Giorgos Mannouris, [piano]
Vasilis Mavratsas, [piano]
Manolis Neophytou, [piano]
Menelaos Menelaou, [violin]
Kyros Patsalides, [baritone]
Nicos Pittas, [violin]
Peter Somodari, [violoncello]
Meta4 [String Quartet]
All
concerts will take place at the PASYDY auditorium (3 Demosthenis Severis Avenue,
Lefkosia) at 8:30 pm.
24/03
Duets by Mozart, Schumann, Shostakovich
[Nicos
Pittas, Menelaos Menelaou, Peter Somodari, Nicolas Costantinou,
Manolis Neophytou, Yorgos Mannouris, Vasilis Mavratsas]
27/03
Trios for piano by Mozart, Schumann, Shostakovich
[Nicos
Pittas, Menelaos Menelaou, Peter Somodari, Nicolas Costantinou,
Manolis Neophytou]
02/04
Songs
by Mozart, Schumann, Shostakovich
[Margarita
Elia, Kyros Patsalides, Nicolas Costantinou]
04/04
String Quartets by Mozart, Schumann, Shostakovich
[Meta4
string quartet]
09/04
Piano Quintets by Mozart, Schumann, Shostakovich
[Meta4
string quartet, Manolis Neophytou, Nicolas Costantinou]
Please
call us at 22352355 for up to-date information!
With
support from the
Cultural
Services of the Ministry of Education and Culture
Sponsors:
Embassy
of Finland, Goethe Zentrum Nicosia, Finnair,
Ticket
information:
Standard
price: £8.00 Reduced price: £6.00 Subscription
series
SPECIAL
OFFER:
Entrance to all 5 concerts: £ 30.00
Free
entrance to Children under 15
Please
contact us here
