The Horn Trios: Johannes Brahms & György Ligeti

The third concert of the 7th International Pharos Contemporary Music Festival, on Tuesday 6 October 2015 at The Shoe Factory, will feature the exceptional, and very well-known to Cyprus audiences, violinist Peter Sheppard Skaerved who will join forces with horn player Carly Lake and pianist Roderick Chadwick in the two most important works ever written for the specific combination of instruments: The Horn Trios by Johannes Brahms and György Ligeti. The concert will also feature works by Olivier Messiaen, David Gorton and the young Cypriot composer Maria Avraam, and it will be followed by a leisurely post-concert performance on the terrace of Luigi Nono’s La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura for violin & tape.

Composed at the peak of Brahms’ chamber music output, the Trio for Horn, Violin and Piano in E-flat major, Op.40 was one of the rare 19th century chamber works in which an instrument of restricted capabilities was assigned a rather virtuosic role. Having already produced several of his chamber masterpieces, Brahms composed the Trio in May 1865, during his stay in the Black Forest near Baden-Baden, while he was still mourning the recent loss of his mother. The combination of horn, violin and piano was not accidental as Brahms’ innate affinity to the “natural horn” derived from the fact that the instrument was his father’s favourite. The result is a deeply commemorative piece, one of the most contemplative works of the chamber repertoire, revealing both a tenderly nostalgic mood and a wistfully rustic quality.
Over a century later, Ligeti’s relentless and painful pursuit of new compositional forms and means of expression, which was often at odds with of the various avant-garde movements of the 20th century, established him as perhaps the most prominent composer of the second half of the century. For four years after the completion of his only opera, the distinctively grotesque Le Grand Macabre, Ligeti suffered a severe crisis of writer’s block, which he overcame only after the composition of his Horn Trio in 1982. Inspired by Brahms’ great masterpiece, Ligeti’s Horn Trio was subtitled Hommage à Brahms and it received its premiere during the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of Brahms’ birth in Hamburg. The work is subtly suggestive of Brahms’s traditional style albeit through a distorting and scathing approach, and it is cast in four movements showcasing a rather traditional thematic development and motivic continuity, whilst remaining highly personal and hauntingly inventive and fresh.

PETER SHEPPARD SKӕRVED / violin
Peter Sheppard Skӕrved is the dedicatee of over 400 works for violin, by composers including Hans Werner Henze, Poul Ruders, David Matthews, Judith Weir and Jörg Widmann. Peter has made over 60 critically acclaimed recordings, including cycles of sonatas by Tartini and Beethoven, Quartets by Reicha and Tippett, and many of the works written for him, resulting in a Grammy nomination, and awards from the BBC Music Magazine. Peter is the only musician to have been invited to curate an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London, and has made and performance projects for the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Library of Congress and galleries worldwide. He is married to the Danish writer and poet, Malene Skӕrved, and is the Viotti Lecturer at the Royal Academy of Music, London, where he was elected Fellow in 2013.

CARLY LAKE / horn
Carly Lake studied horn at Trinity College of Music and the Royal Academy of Music, where she was awarded a Wingate Foundation Scholarship and graduated with distinction in 2012. Carly is now based in Helsinki, Finland and works internationally, including having performed with the Philharmonia Orchestra and London Sinfonietta in the UK and with the Turku Philharmonic and Tapiola Sinfonietta in Finland. She also works extensively as an educator and workshop leader, having led education projects for the Royal Opera House, London Philharmonic Orchestra and National Youth Orchestra, amongst many other organisations. Carly held a Researcher position at the Queen Mary University of London between 2013 and 2015 and she has recently started doctoral work at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki.

RODERICK CHADWICK / piano
Manchester-born Roderick Chadwick is a pianist, writer and teacher who has been described as “possessor of devastating musicality and technique” by the Sunday Times. As a performer he is active mainly as a chamber musician, and has worked extensively with Peter Sheppard Skaerved and the Kreutzer Quartet (recent releases include Finnissy quintets on the Métier label), Mark Knoop and Newton Armstrong – Stockhausen’s Mantra for Hathut records has been critically acclaimed – and the ensembles Plus-Minus and CHROMA. Recently, he has performed at the Bergen Festival, the Wigmore Hall and the inaugural London Contemporary Music Festival, and prior to that at venues across Europe and East Asia such as the Ultima, Borealis and Huddersfield Festivals, Auditorium du Louvre, nyMusikk Oslo, and Tokyo Opera City. He has written about the music of Olivier Messiaen and Gloria Coates and he was recently named Reader in Music at the Royal Academy of Music, where he has taught since 1999.

PROGRAMME:
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897): Trio for Horn, Violin and Piano in E-flat major, Op.40
György Ligeti (1923-2006): Trio for Violin, Horn and Piano
Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992): Appel Interstellaire for solo French Horn
Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992): Fantaisie for Violin and Piano
Maria Avraam: Melpomeni for solo violin (World Premiere)
David Gorton (b.1978): Caprices & Hlowung for Horn and Violin (Cyprus Premiere)

Post-concert Performance, on the The Shoe Factory’s terrace:
Luigi Nono (1924-1990): La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura for Violin and Tape (Cyprus Premiere)

Information: Pharos Arts Foundation Tel. (+357) 22-663871 / www.pharosartsfoundation.org
Box Office: Directly from the Foundation’s website www.pharosartsfoundation.org/Tickets_online.htm or Tel. 9666-9003 (Monday - Friday 10:00am-3:00pm

The event is part of the 7th International Pharos Contemporary Music Festival