A Fishing Fantasy With Ensemble Vinifera
Ensemble Vinifera celebrates its fifth anniversary focusing on quintets in a recital with a fishy theme suitably titled “Fishing Fantasy”! The concert is the latest in the Independent Theatre’s popular “Prelude in Tea” series which includes a delicious afternoon tea the ticket price.
The program opens with Mozart’s sublime Flute Quartet in A, originally composed for private performance and which parodies the work of one of Mozart’s contemporaries! The concert moves on to the light, playful and witty double of Poulenc’s Le Bestiare and Greaves’ A Garden of Weeds. Poulenc’s first song cycle was composed when he was just 20 and these six playful miniatures are set to poems by the French surrealist Apollinaire. They feature three animals of the land and three of the water. Greaves’ song cycle is a setting of the cheeky poems of Jacqueline Froom which celebrate the weeds, rather than the flowers, of a typical English garden!
The program concludes with perhaps the most beloved and famous chamber music of all time: Schubert’s Quintet for Piano and Strings, “The Trout” – a re-working as theme and variations on the composer’s song of the same name.
Ensemble Vinifera was created in 2013 by Ella Brinch (viola), John Lewis (clarinet) and Andrew Wilson (cello) who played together in what is now the Opera Australia Orchestra. The group was created to be inherently flexible allowing exploration of a broad variety of music from various genres, eras and nationalities, all performed to the highest standards.
Vinifera presents a mixture of familiar composers and works along with more obscure offerings and regularly features top-notch Australian guest artists all of whom have studied and performed professionally around the globe across the spectrum of chamber, symphonic and operatic music as well as fields as diverse as theatre, film, television and pop. In this concert, John and Andrew are joined by singer Christina Wilson, Lisa Osmialowski (flute), Alan Hicks (piano), Ben Smith (violin), Rachel Dyker (viola) and David Cooper (double bass).
The programme: Mozart: Flute Quartet No.4 in A major, K.298/ Poulenc: Le Bestiare/ Greaves: A Garden of Weeds/ Schubert: Piano Quintet in A major, D.667 “The Trout”
Tickets: $48 adult, $30 conc, $22 student, and $16 child
Bookings (02) 9955 3000 or www.theindependent.org.au
