Nexus – 2MBS Virtuosi

Friday, 30 April at 8pm

Satu Vänskä (violin), Jeremy Williams (viola), Patrick Murphy ('cello),
Brenda Jones (piano)

Programme

SCHUBERT –  String trio in B flat, D 471, Triosatz

MOZART – Quartet in G minor for violin, viola, 'cello and piano, K 478

BRAHMS – Quartet in A for violin, viola, 'cello and piano, op 26

About the artists

In 2009, Jeremy Williams, former viola player of the Australian String Quartet and then the Grainger Quartet, joined with the Whiteley Trio to form a brand-new piano quartet: Nexus – 2MBS Virtuosi. This group, resident at fine-music radio station 2MBS-FM, gave their highly acclaimed, début, series in 2009.

For us, this nexus provides a much needed Australian piano quartet. It also places 2MBS squarely in the public concert arena and emphasizes the station’s commitment to bring music to the population at large – in person as well as on the air.

Violinist Satu Vänskä was born to a Finnish family in Japan where she took her first violin lessons at the age of three.  Her family moved back to Finland in 1989 and she continued her studies at the Lahti Conservatorium and the Sibelius Academy.  At the age of 11 Satu was selected for the Kuhmo Violin School in Finland, a special institution for talented young violinists.  From 1997 Satu was at the Hochschule für Musik in Munich where she finished her diploma in 2001.  Satu has played chamber music with the Kuhmo Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra and in Finland and Germany.  In 1998, Sinfonia Lahti named her “young soloist of the year”.  Satu plays on a 1763 Tommaso Balestrieri violin.

Jeremy Williams graduated from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama with distinction, then becoming the youngest violinist accepted by the London Symphony Orchestra. Jeremy has toured internationally as a member of the Delme Quartet, the Nash Ensemble and the York Piano Trio. He formed with the Beethoven String Trio of London before being appointed Principal Viola of the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra. Jeremy played viola in the Australian String Quartet and the former Grainger Quartet.

Experienced chamber musician Patrick Murphy was the ‘cellist of the former, award-winning, Tankstream Quartet and played at the royal wedding in Denmark. He frequently plays for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and teaches privately at the Australian Institute of Music and also in the Rising Stars programme at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. He is the ‘cello tutor for the Sydney Youth Orchestra. Patrick has performed in Europe, Japan and Canada, where he was an Artist in Residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts with the Halcyon Quartet.

Pianist Brenda Jones, Brenda holds the degrees of Bachelor and Master of Music from the University of Southern California and was awarded a fellowship to study at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. She was a top prize winner in the 2003 Dublin International Piano Competition and a Semi-Finalist in the 2004 Sydney Iinternational Piano Competition. She toured throughout Europe and the USA before moving to Sydney in 2005. Brenda enjoys a diverse and highly accliamed career as chamber musician, soloist and teacher.

SCHUBERT – Trio in B flat for violin, 'cello and piano, Triosatz , D 28

Allegro

The fifteen-year-old Schubert wrote this ten-minute movement for piano trio in 1812 during his last days as a choirboy at the Imperial Court in Vienna. He labelled it Sonate suggesting, perhaps, that other movements might follow later. As we now know, they didn't, although eight bars of a second movement, marked andante sostenuto, are held in the Stadtsbibliothek in Vienna.

Schubert's first piece in piano-trio form could have been intended for the informal musical sessions that he, his brothers and his father enjoyed when relaxing at home.

This is a rather conventional work, written in a loose sonata form, and the lyrical melodies which characterize Schubert's later music seem to be merely embrionic here.

This is a pleasant work, with some charming passages, even if not particularly profound. At the beginning, one might be forgiven for thinking one is listening to Haydn, but this impression soon dissolves. There seems little attempt to move away from the key of B flat from start to finish. The original manuscript was not discovered until 1922.

MOZART – Quartet in G minor for violin, viola, 'cello and piano, K 478

Allegro / Andante / Rondo: Allegro

It seems that Mozart's piano quartet in G minor, composed in 1785, was to have been the first of two, commissioned by Mozart's friend and colleague, Franz Anton Hoffmeister. The story goes that when Hoffmeister complained that the public found the work too difficult and would not buy it, Mozart released him from the contract of publishing the second work. At the time, the piano quartet was a relatively unknown genre of music and, indeed, Mozart's great piano quartets come from a later period. As Neal Zaslaw says, "Mozart seems virtually to have invented the piano quartet". This work is, in Einstein's words, "no longer in any sense music of mere sociability, which can be listened to superficially".

Mozart works in G minor have a special, rather tragic, quality; they include the great

G-minor symphony of 1787, K 550, and the string quintet, K 516. The piano quartet in G minor opens with a large-scale sonata-form movement that includes stormy drama and more lyrical introspection. The movement ends with a coda in which all four instruments finally come together in what Abert calls a "unison of a spine-chilling force". The restlessness of the slow movement, in sonatina form, is underlined by a repeated demi-semi-quaver motif which seems to haunt the music. The finale is a high-spirited but serious rondo in which the agitation of the opening movement returns in the syncopations and upward-thrusting of the main theme, although the many additional themes include motifs that bring at least some jovial relief.

Even though this work is Mozart's first in his new piano-trio genre, "piano-concerto" style writing is virtually absent. Most of the textures arise either from the strings doubling or accompanying the piano, or from thematic material being passed from one instrument to another.

BRAHMS – Quartet in A for violin, viola, 'cello and piano, op 26

Allegro non troppo / Poco adagio / Scherzo: poco allegro / Finale: allegro

Johannes Brahms wrote three piano quartets, two (op 25 and op 26) in 1861-2, both published in 1863, and one (op 60) which was started in 1855 but later re-cast and eventually published in 1875. His second piano quartet, in A major, is dedicated to Elisabeth Rösing, who provided the composer with the relaxed atmosphere of her house in Hamburg, in which to do his composing. The work was given its first performance in Vienna at the end of 1862, at a concert by means of which Brahms introduced himself into that city.

This is a sunny, appealing work. The introductory rhythm appears throughout the opening movement, forming part of both the first and second subjects and reappearing in the development section in a modified form. The second, slow, movement begins and ends with muted strings. It is a haunting movement, reminiscent of a nocturne that is occasionally interrupted by a broad, more forceful theme. The so-called scherzo opens with a graceful theme which sets a friendly atmosphere that is complemented by the rather stormy accompanying trio section. The finale is written in a free rondo form, having three thematic groups and concluding with a lively coda.