Programme notes
We are very much looking forward to welcoming back a physical audience to join us for our annual concert at All Saints, West Dulwich on Saturday 5th March. Tickets
As with many of our concerts, we have matched some of our most loved pieces of quartet repertoire with something new for us, as well as possibly for the audience.
We will be starting the programme with Haydn’s Op 33 no. 4, chosen because of its sublime slow movement. The second half of the concert will be Schubert’s Rosamunde Quartet. This was the only quartet of Schubert’s to have been performed and published during his lifetime, and is just full of beauty at every step along the way.
In between both of these more familiar pieces in the programme, we are very excited to be bringing to our repertoire a piece which we have recently discovered: A 2 movement quartet by Florence Price, written in 1929. After hearing a recording of this piece a few months ago, and knowing we wanted to perform it at some point soon, it was then a difficult search to locate a copy of it. It is not available in the UK, and any US websites which might have led somewhere all seemed to say it was not in stock. We managed, just before Christmas to find somewhere in the US which made re-prints of parts, and so we were finally able to order it. Having done so, there was no guarantee of when it would arrive. However, it arrived soon after the New Year, and so we are now able to include it in our Programme for West Dulwich on 5th March 2022.
Florence Price worked against all kinds of adversity in her career as both a female and someone of colour. Composing music in a particularly male dominated environment, and one where the classical music scene did not have much representation by black composers, her output was never the less equal to any of her contemporaries. After Florence Price’s death in 1953, her music faded into obscurity, until a discovery in 2009, when a couple bought the house which had been her Summer retreat. A filing cabinet contained many orchestral works including 2 violin concertos, and many other manuscripts had been scattered when the house was vandalised some years earlier. This led to a re-discovery of all of her works, and a contemporary revival of the music of Florence Price.
This quartet has many echoes of Tchaikovsky’s Quartet no. 1 which we have preformed previously in Dulwich, and more recently at our last concert in Central London. We are really pleased for all of these reasons to be able to include this piece in our programme for 5th March. All Saints, West Dulwich.
Thanks to Bronsens and Herne Hill School for their support.
