Following the roaring success of our LIVE AT LAST!! Concert on August 31st, we are thrilled to announce LIVE AT LAST II with more of your favourite musicians in a variety of chamber combinations, performing popular melodies, and some works that may be completely new to you! The concert will feature:

• Four Basses of the TSO - one of the most watched ensembles on #TSODailyDose - performing movements from Colin Brumby’s Suite for basses, and music from Chicago!
• A delightful ensemble of three bassoons and tuba, performing music of Gershwin, and Rodgers and Hammerstein.
• Andrew Seymour and Eloise Fisher performing music for clarinet duo, by Poulenc and Tasmania’s own Jabra Latham.

 

Pictured (L - R): Stewart Thomson, Aurora Heinrich, James Menzies, and Matt McGrath.

Before entry to the concert you will be required to sign a declaration that you agree with the following:

1. You do not currently have symptoms of a respiratory infection (i.e. fever, sore throat, cough, cold, flu-like symptoms or shortness of breath).
2. You have not had close contact with a suspected or confirmed case of COVID- 19 in the past 14 days.
3. You have not returned to Australia from overseas apart from New Zealand in the past 14 days.
4. You have not returned to Tasmania from Victoria in the last 14 days.
5. You have not been tested for COVID-19 recently and are awaiting test results.
6. You have not been directed to self-isolate/quarantine for 14 days and/or have not completed that 14-day period.

Program Notes

George Gershwin, arranged by Dennis Armitage
'A Portrait'

Tahnee Van Herk, Simone Walters, Tasman Compton, bassoons, Tim Jones, tuba

George Gershwin (born Jakob Bruskin Gershowitz in 1898 in Brooklyn, New York) was an American composer and pianist. Some of his best known compositions include the opera Porgy and Bess, orchestral works, American in Paris and Rhapsody in Blue, and jazz standard I got Rhythm.

As a young pianist, George worked for Aeolian Company and Standard Music Rolls in New York, recording and arranging hundreds of piano rolls. In the mid 1920s Gershwin went to Paris, hoping to study composition with the noted Nadia Boulanger, and also Maurice Ravel, both of whom turned him down. Ravel’s rejection letter famously told him “why become a second-rate Ravel when you’re already a first-rate Gershwin?”

He died of a malignant brain tumour when he was only 38 years old.

Colin Brumby
Suite for Four Double Basses

Movements 1 & 2.

James Menzies, Aurora Heinrich, Matt McGrath & Stuart Thomson, double basses

Colin Brumby (1933-2018) was born in Melbourne and studied at the University of Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. He studied composition in Spain and London, and upon returning to Australia was appointed to the faculty at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music in 1964, eventually becoming an Associate Professor at the University of Queensland.

His compositions feature vocal works, songs, choral and orchestral works, and include eight operettas for children, as well as some chamber music. Suite for four double basses was commissioned by British bassist (past Principal of St Martin in the Fields and the English Chamber Orchestra), Rodney Slatford, and was premiered at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1976.

Francis Poulenc
Sonata for Two Clarinets

Andrew Seymour, Eloise Fisher, clarinets

Poulenc's Sonata for Two Clarinets, composed when he was just 19 years old, is amongst his earliest published works. It is a forerunner to his lifelong interest in writing for wind instruments and shows his enduring affinity for the clarinet in particular. Poulenc makes a number of interesting compositional choices in the sonata. The most unusual aspect is that one player uses the Bb clarinet throughout, while the other plays the slightly larger A clarinet. This allows Poulenc to play with different colours between the two instruments, particularly in the second movement. He also plays with polyrhythms, with the two parts often playing in different time signatures. These techniques give playful jabs to the ear in a piece that takes the listener from the serene to the jocular.

F.H.J. Castil-Blaze (1784-1857)
Trio for Three Bassoons

Tahnee Van Herk, Simone Walters, Tasman Compton, bassoons

Francois Henri Joseph Castil-Blaze lived in Provence and later Paris, and is probably best known as the writer of several books on music and drama, and for some admired translations of Italian and German opera libretto into French. His compositions include some “dubious interpolations” of his own into some of these operas and other works, including the trio for 3 bassoons you will hear today.

Jabra Latham
Beserkers

Andrew Seymour, Eloise Fisher, clarinets

The musical material in Jabra Latham’s ‘Berserkers’ was originally conceived for a solo clarinet work. Here written for two instruments, the two players play exactly the same music, only displaced by two notes. The trance like relentlessness this effect creates is where the piece derives it’s name from. The Berserkers, according to the Old Norse written corpus, were warriors who were said to have fought in a trance like fury. Today’s performance is the works’ premiere.

Chicago’s Basses
Music by John Kandor, arranged Ashley Frampton

James Menzies, Aurora Henrich, Matt McGrath & Stuart Thomson, double basses

A world premiere performance of your favourite tunes from Chicago, the broadway musical which opened at the 46th St Theatre in 1975, and the West End in 1979.

Proudly commissioned by the TSO Bass Quartet, with help from the TSO Commissioning Circle.