MELIORA QUARTET

Cillian Ó Cathasaigh, violin
Seán Hurley, violin
Kseniia Yershova, viola
Alina Obreja, cello

Haydn - String Quartet Op.76 No.4 Sunrise [1797]
Webern: Langsamer Satz [1905]
Caroline Shaw - Blueprint [2016]
Ludwig van Beethoven - String Quartet in B flat major Op.130 [1826]

The outstanding Meliora Quartet will take part in the Young Musicians Programme at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival in June/July and will also be the NSQF Fellowship Quartet at the Concorda Chamber Music Course in July/August, working with the course participants as well as preparing for this tour.

The Sunrise is perhaps the most popular of all Haydn’s wonderful string quartets. Each of its four movements is vividly characterised - the first evoking the rising of the sun, the second prayerful, the third presenting a wild dance and the finale creating imaginative variations around a simple folksong-like theme and building to a virtuosic conclusion.

Webern’s ‘Langsamer Satz’ (slow piece) is a beautiful and passionate love song to his future wife, written in the rich late Romantic soundworld of his teacher Schoenberg’s Verklarte Nacht.

Pulitzer prize winning composer Caroline Shaw took Beethoven’s quartet Op.18 No.6, as the blueprint of her 2016 quartet of that name and its transformation is both fascinating and entertaining.

The magnificent, epic, opening movement of Beethoven’s B flat major quartet Op.130 is followed by four beautifully crafted and highly contrasted inner movements, culminating in the famous Cavatina of which Beethoven wrote that he had composed it truly in the tears of melancholy. It leads into the quartet’s concluding finale, a good-natured antidote which Beethoven wrote, at his publisher’s request, as an alternative to the quartet’s original last movement, the massive Grosse Fuge.

AURELIAN ENSEMBLE

Anna Jansson, violin
Kate O’Shea, violin
Charlie Duff, viola
Adam Joyce, cello
Jekabs Brants, clarinet
Carl Roewer, bassoon
Róisín Martin, horn
Zosia Switaj, double bass

FRANZ SCHUBERT - Octet in F major D.803

The Aurelian Ensemble is a brand new Chamber Music Collective, founded out of a shared love for Franz Schubert’s monumental Octet in F Major — a work whose warmth, lyricism, and symphonic scale have inspired musicians and audiences for generations.

Written in 1824 and modelled in part after Beethoven’s Septet, the Octet expands the possibilities of chamber music with sweeping melodies, rich textures, and extraordinary interplay between the eight performers.

These performances celebrate Schubert’s Octet as the piece that has brought these eight dynamic young musicians - from a variety of backgrounds and all high achievers in their own right - together for their inaugural tour.