Chamber Music Concert

The next chamber music concert with members of the CySO will take place on Saturday 20 April 2013. The programme includes works by Benjamin Britten, Tomaso Albioni, Ayis Ioannides, Aaron Coplant and Antonio Vivaldi. The musicians are Gareth Griffiths (trumpet), Elena Mitella-Violari (piano), Laura Rodgers- Griffiths, David Perpiñan Sanchis (oboe)

The concert will take place on Saturday 20 April 2013 at 17:00 at the Pallas Theatre, Paphos Gate, Nicosia and the entrance is free for the public. For more information please call 22 463144 and or visit www.cyso.org.cy

Benjamin Britten (1913–1976) composed the Fanfare for St Edmundsbury for three trumpets in 1959 for a ‘Pageant of Magna Carta’ in the grounds of St Edmundsbury Cathedral in Bury St Edmunds. In this piece Britten makes use of only the pitches found in three different harmonic series based on F, C and D. The trumpeters are instructed to stand as far apart as possible from each other. Each trumpet presents its own material in a different key and style, after which they repeat them simultaneously. At first, this seems to create chaos, but gradually this chaos turns into unity.

Tomaso Albinoni’s (1671–1751) Concerto in F belongs a series of twelve concertos published as opus 9 in 1722 under the title Concerti a cinque. In these challenging works, Albinoni introduced characteristics of various European national music styles of the time as well as musical allegories. The Concerto No. 3 proposes a musical rendering of courtly life. The Adagio is a siciliano with its many lilting rhythms, while the finale is a jig written in the alla caccia (hunting) style.

In 1939, director Harold Clurman asked Aaron Copland (1900–1990) to provide incidental music for Irwin Shaw’s play Quiet City that opened in New York City at the Group Theatre. The play was ‘a realistic fantasy concerning the night thoughts of many different kinds of people in a great city’ and centered on a lonely Jewish boy, who expressed his sorrow and isolation on his jazz trumpet. In 1941, Copland reworked the material into an atmospheric double concerto of a brooding and elegiac character.

An early work, composed in 1978 as an experiment in purely linear writing without harmonic considerations. The Sonata for Oboe is in one continuous movement, which perhaps contradicts the title «sonata». Nevertheless, elements of sonata form, such as development and recapitulation of basic ideas, are combined with characteristics other movements of the traditional sonata: slow movement and scherzo. The work is dedicated to the Canadian oboist Margaret Shabas, who gave its first performance at the British Music Information Centre.

Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741) has written more than 500 concertos for solo instruments as well as for two and more soloists, the earliest of which date from 1709. His concertos were internationally revered with Germany showing the greatest enthusiasm (Bach transcribed some of them for keyboard). Vivaldi standardized the movements of concertos to three, and he was one of the first, if not the first, who used ritornellos (refrains) in fast movements. The Concerto in D major is one of forty concertos for two soloists and string orchestra.