Programme Notes

A varied lunchtime programme that offers audiences the chance to hear festival artists in a more intimate offering, exploring music that ranges from lightness and charm to inward intensity; music to laugh and cry to on a smaller, more personal scale.

A reflective moment comes with Bach’s Sonatina from Actus tragicus, BWV 106, heard in a transcription for piano four hands by György Kurtág. A distillation of Bach’s expressive clarity and restraint.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Violin Sonata in G major, K. 301 is a model of balance and ease, marked by conversational interplay between violin and piano and an effortless sense of charm.

The second Korngold work of the festival, Much Ado About Nothing, Op. 11, was originally written as incidental music to Shakespeare’s play and is heard here in a suite of four movements for violin and piano. Lyrical and finely detailed, the music retains a strong sense of narrative, with each movement shaped by its theatrical origins.

Dobrinka Tabakova’s Insight (2013) offers a contemporary perspective through music of quiet intensity and finely balanced textures. Characterised by clarity, stillness and subtle harmonic shifts, the piece unfolds with an inward focus that invites close, attentive listening.

The programme concludes with György Ligeti’s String Quartet No. 1, Métamorphoses Nocturnes, a work of extraordinary imagination. Written in the early 1950s, it unfolds as a continuous sequence of transformations, shifting rapidly between textures, moods and gestures in music that is at once playful and unsettling, visceral and deeply human. The festival is delighted to welcome the Ligeti Quartet to perform this landmark work.