Sarah Saviet and Joseph Houston bring to Luton a 20th Century programme of great European classics for violin and piano. Their repertoire has much resonance with our season’s theme of Family Relationships.
Joseph Joachim was one of the most significant musicians of the 19th Century. As a legendary violinist and great friend of Brahms his influence on all the chamber music of that great composer is something we have already enjoyed elsewhere in this series. Meanwhile Joachim had a great niece – Jelly d’Arányi – and she in her turn influenced another wave of astonishing concert repertoire for the violin, as the dedicatee of both extraordinary sonatas of Béla Bartók, of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Concerto Accademico and Maurice Ravel’s Tzigane. Gustav Holst wrote his Double Concerto for Two Violins for Jelly and her sister Adila Fachri, another exceptional member of this violinistic dynasty. This concert offers performances of two of those epic works.
Other familial associations in this thrilling 20th Century programme can be appreciated in Messiaen’s Theme and Variations. It was originally written as a wedding present for the young composer’s first wife, the violinist Claire Delbos, whom he married on 22 June 1932. The young couple gave the first performance in November that same year.
Richard Sisson
Programme
- Claude Debussy – Sonata for Violin and Piano
- Béla Bartók – Sonata No.2 for Violin and Piano
- Olivier Messiaen – Theme and Variations
- Cassandra Miller – for mira
- Claude Debussy – L’isle joyeuse
- Maurice Ravel – Tzigane