Pre-concert Talks & Scripts

Musica Viva Australia

Pinchas Zukerman and Marc Neikrug - BEETHOVEN SONATAS

What I’m going to talk about for the next few minutes is really to make the point to you that you’re lucky to be having a concert like tonight’s – a real recital of Beethoven piano and violin sonatas given by a violinist and pianist who are an established partnership, whose interpretation is the fruit of long experience playing the music together...

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Jerusalem Quartet - BEETHOVEN, WIESENBERG, SHOSTAKOVICH

August 17, 2001

Chamber music is an international language, but sometimes we are reminded of the players’ country of origin. If a Czech string quartet comes here, we look forward to their Dvořák or their Janáček, expecting to find, perhaps, a special injection of patriotic feeling. And if the Jerusalem Quartet plays Wiesenberg or Shostakovich do we expect some political insight? Should we? Surely the music speaks for itself...

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Jerusalem Quartet - HAYDN, WIESENBERG, MENDELSSOHN

August 19, 2001

This is a program of contrasts, and of affinities, as you’d expect with a program entirely of string quartets. And brilliantly presented by these young players…

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Takacs Quartet - MILLS, JANÁČEK, SCHUBERT

2008

Tonight’s concert – by the Takacs Quartet - is a very demanding program and maybe once it would have been considered a ‘hard sell’. But something has happened, in our history, to make it cool to go to a string quartet program, and especially, perhaps, if the string quartet performing it has some fame, some cachet, if you like...

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Tasmanian Symphony Chamber Players - Telemann's Don Quichotte

March 5, 2001

The subject of my talk today is to be language, musical language and other language. I think you’ll guess why, if you think about the last work on tonight’s program, Telemann’s Don Quichotte Suite...

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Škampa Quartet - MOZART, SMETANA, DVOŘÁK

September 14, 1999

There will be people in my audience tonight, I’m sure, who remember the Smetana Quartet well. And here, tonight, we have a quartet from the same country, with the same repertoire, and named after the viola player of the Smetana Quartet, Milan Škampa, who was their mentor…

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