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Michael Collins & Friends (2 of 2) – Friday 28 April

Michael Collins & Friends
Michael Collins clarinet | Corey Cerovsek and Akiko Ono violins | Rachel Roberts viola |  Steffan Morris cello | Michael McHale piano

Stravinsky   The Soldier’s Tale: Suite
Robin Holloway   Trio for Clarinet, Viola and Piano Op 79
Bartók   Contrasts
Prokofiev   Overture on Hebrew Themes Op 34
Shostakovich   Piano Quintet in G minor Op 57

 

Michael Collins is joined for the evening concert by three more friends – Rachel Roberts who is a regular visitor with Ensemble 360, plus the Canadian violinist Corey Cerovsek and Japanese violinist Akiko Ono – and they bring a programme which is true Festival fare. It includes another work by Robin Holloway, premièred by Emma Johnson in Malvern in 1994. Stravinsky effectively left Russia before World War One and wrote The Soldier’s Tale in Switzerland. Bartók left Hungary in 1940 for America where he composed Contrasts for Benny Goodman. Prokofiev, who was born in Ukraine, spent fifteen years in the USA and France before returning to Russia in 1933. He suffered, like Shostakovich, from the ideological demands of Communism but wrote many great scores. Shostakovich was eventually allowed to travel out of the USSR and his reputation has grown over the last fifty years. His Piano Quintet written in 1940 is a powerful masterpiece.

£26 | £16
(£1 children / students)

Michael Collins & Friends (1 of 2) – Friday 28 April

Michael Collins & Friends
Michael Collins clarinet | Steffan Morris cello | Michael McHale piano

Robin Holloway   Romanza & Scherzo
Glinka   Trio pathétique in D minor
Brahms   Clarinet Trio in A minor Op 114

 

Michael Collins has been delighting audiences in and around Leamington for many years and he comes with some of his many musical friends to contribute to the 2023 Festival with its various connections. Michael McHale is Michael Collins’s regular accompanist and Steffan Morris is the cellist in the Castalian String Quartet.

In the first of the six works programmed to celebrate Leamington-born composer Robin Holloway’s 80th birthday, Michael plays the Romanza & Scherzo that Robin was invited to write for Michael’s 60th birthday and which Michael premièred at the Wigmore Hall last year. Glinka wrote this Trio in 1832, four years before his opera A Life for the Tsar, after which, with Ruslan and Ludmila, found him described as the founder of Russian national music. The Trio by Brahms, like his Clarinet Quintet, was inspired by the playing of Richard Muhlfeld and is one of the masterpieces for this combination of instruments.

£17.50 | £12.50
(£1 children / students)

Richard Watkins horn, Magnus Johnston violin, Michael McHale piano

Maxwell Davies Fanfare Salute to Dennis Brain Op 227b
Beethoven Sonata for Horn and Piano in F Op 17
Simpson Trio for Horn, Piano and Violin
Brahms Trio in E flat

 

Another champion of the music of Robert Simpson, Richard Watkins recorded the Trio nine years after its completion in 1984, and we begin the concert with a tribute to the great horn player, Dennis Brain, who shares Simpson’s centenary this year.

Beethoven’s Sonata was written at an exciting time of the most important developments in all wind instruments. And to follow, with the addition of the violin, this unusual combination of instruments brings the concert to a wonderful climax in Brahms’s glorious composition.

Richard Watkins is joined by two illustrious colleagues for this wonderfully crafted programme. Magnus Johnston is well known to Leamington audiences having performed here with both the Navarra Quartet and the Aronowitz Ensemble. Michael McHale is much in demand as a collaborator, and last played for Leamington Music with clarinettist Michael Collins in the 2017 Festival.