Australia Ensemble UNSW 2022 Subscription Concert: Delicioso

Complete the season with the rich and refined Romantic textures of Brahms’s Third Piano Quartet and Amy Beach’s Romance, the sparkle of Mozart at the height of his career, and spicy jazz-influenced dance music of Martinů’s La Revue de Cuisine.

Wolfgang MOZART | Piano Trio in B flat K502 (1786)

Johannes BRAHMS | Clarinet Sonata Op.120 no.2 (1894)

Amy BEACH | Romance Op.23 (1893)

Bohuslav MARTINŮ | La Revue de Cuisine (1927)

David Griffiths, clarinet; and Ian Munro, piano 

with guest artists Lerida Delbridge, violin; Tim Nankervis, cello; Andrew Barnes, bassoon; and David Elton, trumpet

Despite, or perhaps because of, an epic lunch before the concert, Brahms and his esteemed clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld wowed audiences in Leipzig with his E-flat sonata in 1895. It has great tonal richness, nostalgic and tranquil, with a surging central section.

Published two years before, the Romance by neglected US composer Amy Beach has a similar mood and shape, with long, songlike arcs briefly giving way to impassioned turbulence.

Mozart wrote his B-flat Piano Trio between Figaro and Don Giovanni. It’s comic, with a sparkling opening theme and pop-music beat, a calm Andante and witty finale, all tinged with occasional glimpses of sadness.

In Paris in 1927, Bohuslav Martinů composed The Temptation of the Saintly Pot, a ballet in which the marriage of a pot and a lid is interrupted by the arrival of a philandering twirling stick, a dishcloth and a pugnacious broom. Four of the most characteristic – and jazzy – movements form his La Revue de Cuisine suite.