Evening Concert – Studio 150 Amsterdam, Netherlands

This specially filmed concert will become available to view here at 7pm on Saturday 4th July 2020. The link will be shared on our social media, or you can check-in to this event page to watch it here.

If the concert is not immediately visible at that time, please refresh this page.

If you would like to make a donation towards the cost of these performances, please click on the Donate button below. All donations will go directly to the musicians.

Once again we are guests of Studio 150 in the lovely Bethlehemkerk, whose model of an intimate concert space with quality livestream facilities is something the music sector will everywhere be imitating. This concert’s programme is the nearest this series can come to a real Festival concert with its wide range of repertoire and performers, beginning with a bassoon miniature by Andriessen, followed by a concertante Bottesini piece for  double bass and bassoon and Rebecca Clarke’s delicious Viola Sonata before concluding with five of the seven players in an Amsterdam Trout Quintet.

Bram van Sambeek was this summer along with Signum Quartet scheduled to give the Irish premiere of a bassoon quintet by Sebastian Fagerlund, a premiere that may not  even take place next year. The miniature by Andriessen is a great way to kick off this concert, leading into the Bottesini showpiece with bassist Rick Stotijn and young pianist Aidan Mikdad. Bottesini was an exceptional musician, who became a star double bass player almost by accident, not just a player but the go-to composer for the double bass. The Gran Duo was originally composed for clarinet and bass, but some clever transposition has made it available for the bassoon, an instrument also always looking for solo repertoire.

Rebecca Clarke was in the vanguard of women composer at the beginning of the last century, but was gradually worn down by a society that rendered women culturally invisible. Her Viola Sonata is a tremendous piece and no better two musicians than Dana Zemtsov and Anna Fedorova to remind us how this work breaks the mould in so many ways. Among many influences she herself picks out the French influence by quoting Alfred de Musset’s La Nuit de Mai on the score: Poet, take up your lute, the wine of youth ferments this night in the veins of God. It is a passionate and tempestuous work, from the clarion call of the opening bars to the rapturous conclusion of the Finale. The two musicians turn this performance into a blaze of light that first burned just 101 years ago.

Take Schubert, add a viola and a bass to a piano trio, and you have the Trout, a work that needs no introduction, especially with such a dazzling performance. Five players and five movements, a summer holiday in the mountains of Upper Austria and a deadline created this quintet, surely just intended as a summer fantasy in the mountains, but has become the staple of festivals ever since. The key is for the musicians to be seen to enjoy the music as much as we do.

Programme