From Duo to Quintet

Musicians of the Mariinsky Orchestra of the Primorsky Stage present the programme From Duet to Quintet with musical compositions covering the period from the 17th to the 20^th centuries. The concert will be opened with Sonata for clarinet and bassoon by early Francis Poulenc, which is already marked by his distinctive style. The lively, full of feeling music and coordinated sounding of the instruments speak of increasing mastery of the 23-year old composer.

The evening will be continued by rarely performed vocal pieces by European authors sung by the soprano Alena Diyanova. They include an emotional ballad by the most renowned Finnish composer Jean Sibelius and a lightsome lullaby written by his brother-in-law Armas Järnefelt, a student of Busony and Massenet. The antithesis of the latter is the mourning song "Zur Rosenzeit" written the Norwegian Edvard Grieg after the death of his little daughter Alexandra. Filled with dramatic mood recitative Ese un giorno tornasse (What If One Day He Were To Return) is written by Ottorino Respighi, an Italian composer, who tried to reconstruct the operatic stage even in chamber music.

Part 1 will end with a quartet of double-basses – low string instruments, which are seldom heard outside orchestra repertoire. The ensemble will perform one of concertos – adapted for such an unusual instrumental combination – by Georg Philipp Telemann – the most prolific Baroque composer, whose legacy comprises more than three thousand compositions. And, of course, the musicians couldn’t ignore works by the Paganini of double bass – Giovanni Bottesini. His Passione Amorosa demonstrates melodic and virtuosic capabilities of the instrument, while the first movement is an arrangement of the vocal duo La Serenata by Giacomo Rossini.

The second part of the concert is given to brass instruments. A trombone trio will play works by Soviet composers, written with this instrumentation in mind: Suite by one of the founders of the Russian trombone school – Vladislav Blazhevich and Sonata by Ukrainian composer Alexander Znosko-Borovsky. The intensely programmed concert will culminate with famous works by foreign composers of the Baroque period (Bach, Handel) and Farandole by Bizet adapted for brass-quintet.