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Saturday, 22 November 2014

Programme planning

A  concert which begins with Beethoven’s earliest string quartet, Op 18, No 3, composed at the age of 30, and ends with Mozart’s last, K590, composed at the age of 34, shows a very special sense of programme structure.

I do not think I have ever heard the two works performed on a single evening,  and the fact that  the Belcea Quartet has chosen to do so at the Queen's Hall  in Edinburgh on December 8  speaks eloquently for itself. Written eleven years apart, the works represent two aspects of the enlightenment. It will be wonderful to hear them side by side, with a new work by Mark Anthony Turnage as the cntral panel of what promises to be a compelling musical triptych.

Turnage, now in his middle fifties, began as one of the bad boys of modern British music, an equivalent of the angry young men - John Osborne, John Wain, Kingsley Amis, Arnold Wesker, to name but four - who pervaded the world of English literature and drama in the middle of the twentieth century. His opera entitled Greek, an update of Oedipus Rex, was brought from its Munich premiere to the Edinburgh Festival in 1988, and with its hero called Eddie it caused a few festival shocks.

Other works by him have included a trombone concerto entitled Yet Another Set To, a flute concerto entitled Five Views of a Mouth, and a conflict between jazz and classicism entitled Blood on the Floor.

But his string quartet, entitled Contusion, is somewhat different. . Inspired by a poem written by Sylvia Plath a week before she killed herself, its emotional charge is of another sort. This concert, forming part of the fiftieth anniversary season of New TownConcerts is something to look forward to.
22 November 2014

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