Mozart’s wit, joy, love and understanding
The Chiaroscuro Quartet are visiting the Chichester Chamber Concerts series for a residency of two concerts, with the second on March 10 at 7.30pm in the Assembly Room (tickets from the CFT).
For the second they will be joined by clarinettist Matthew Hunt and friends to play the Schubert Octet.
Joining the night are Alec Frank Gemill horn; Chris Rawley bassoon; and Juliane Bruckmann double bass.
The concert will open with Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet.
Matthew is solo clarinettist with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, a professor at the Hochschule Essen and a member of Sheffield-based Ensemble 360.
He is delighted to be working with the Chiaroscuro Quartet.
“Our concert at the Chichester Assembly Room on March 10 features two of the most uplifting and heartwarming pieces in the repertoire and are without doubt pinnacles of the music written for strings and winds together.
“Mozart wrote his clarinet quintet whilst writing his opera Cosi Fan Tuttle, for his friend Anton Stadler.
The quintet plays on the vocal characteristics of the clarinet, and plays with the blend and the dialogue between the instruments. We hear so much of Mozart’s clear wit, joy, love and enormous understanding of what it is to be human in this piece. Schubert’s octet is in divertimento form– six movements, written to ‘divert’ or entertain, although he takes this to an entirely new level.
“His letters of the time display him to be in the pits of despair, yet he pours nothing but love and dreams of ecstatic joy into the piece. The dialogue between the instruments is always entertaining and often seems to me to be the equivalent of a musical frisbee game.
“We will play them all on instruments of the period in which they were written (1789 and 1824).
“This means that the string players will play on open gut strings which have a warmer sound, speak rather differently and need plenty of love and care and will use classical era bows, which are lighter and less even in the weight of sound.
“The bassoon and clarinet will be playing copies of the instruments from the classical period, made of lighter, less dense box and rosewood and equipped with very few keys which makes life more virtuosic and produces softer, more voicelike sounds.
“The horn will be a natural horn, much like a hunting horn, having to use lips and hand position to change notes rather than the valves of a modern horn.
“This makes for a terrifically exciting, more extreme and less polite evening where as performers we have to leave our comfort zones and experience both the joys and the thrills and spills of playing music for the instruments that the composers had in their ears.
“The group is formed for a series of concerts this spring, taking the world renowned Chiarascuro Quartet as a base, and adding some of the finest musicians from all over Europe into the mix.”