As part of our mentoring scheme this season, the Gildas quartet will welcome onto the platform one of their most promising young students from the Birmingham Conservatoire. Viola player, Erin Vinter, will join the quartet in a performance of Mozart’s remarkable late String Quintet in G minor K516. This particular development of our season’s theme – The Ties between Pupil & Teacher – has been made possible by a most generous anonymous donation, for which many thanks.
In the second half of their programme the quartet play Britten’s 3rd String Quartet. Reading about the history of this work I learned that a one-time student of Britten’s, David Matthews whose 80th birthday celebrations we have been recognising this season, played through the score of this work privately to the composer. Alongside his brother Colin Matthews, they played a piano duet reduction of the new score to Benjamin Britten in December 1975. Apparently this was the first time the great British composer had ever heard this latest work realised. Sadly he was to die a year later in December 1976 and the quartet proved to be his final major work. This wonderful act of playing through the score for Britten must have been a most satisfying way to repay the debt of all that David Matthews had learned from his extraordinary teacher.
Richard Sisson (Programme Planner)
Programme
The concert will include:
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – String Quintet in G minor K516
Benjamin Britten – String Quartet No.3 Op 94
Performers
- Tom Aldren (violin)
- Gemma Sharples (violin)
- Francesca Gilbert (viola)
- Anna Menzies (cello)
with Erin Vinter (viola)