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I must say, looking before the concert at the
combination of instruments involved, I didn’t think I was going to
enjoy this recital by The Sterling Trio: Sarah Atter (flute), Thomas
Verity (clarinet) and Lauren Hibberd (piano). But I was glad when my
fears were not justified, for it turned out to be one of the most
relaxed, nicely introduced and skilfully played performances for
SASRA Music & Arts in recent years.
This young and very talented group was formed at The Royal Northern
College of Music in 2006, and they produced a wide-ranging programme
of music from the 16th to the 21stt centuries - mainly arrangements,
of course, since original pieces for flute, clarinet and piano are
not all that common.
But the transcriptions were so beautifully done and played that you
would have thought that J S Bach and Mendelssohn had actually
written the G major Trio Sonata and the three Songs Without Words
respectively, for the three instruments. The Trio by Madeleine Dring
(an unjustly neglected composer and student of Vaughan Williams), in
which the clarinet had replaced the oboe, was a finely crafted
piece, with a most attractive slow movement. The Opus 2 Trio by Leon
Levitch was a revelation. This had actually been written for piano,
flute and clarinet and had involved a fair amount of detective work
by Tom Verity to obtain the musical score, including a long-distance
and a ‘somewhat scratchy’ telephone call to the composer, now 84 and
living in California!
The ‘The Grand Fantasia’ by Malcolm Arnold was a real virtuoso
performance with a whole succession of different musical styles:
Italian Opera, jazz, tango and a waltz. It concluded, almost (The
Trio still had the energy to play an encore) an evening that was
greatly appreciated by the audience who, I imagine, went home
grateful that such high quality musical performances are still being
presented in our rather remote part of the country. Perhaps they
were already looking forward to the next concert………………………..
People say music and mathematics tend to go together, so regular
followers of the SASRA Music & Arts programme may have noticed a
numerical connection between the numbers of performers so far in
this year’s programme. The first three concerts have involved 8, 24
and 3 performers, so it was inevitable that the next one on 20
January 2012 would involve a further reduction by a factor 3. It
will be given by a solo pianist. Sarah Beth Briggs will play the
mighty ‘Waldstein’ Sonata by Beethoven and the complete Book 1 of
Debussy’s preludes.
On this basis, is it possible to predict how many players will
appear in the fifth concert of the series on February 24? The answer
is ‘no’. The artists are The Fontanella Recorder Quintet, so there
will be five.
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