Lunchtime Concert Slava Grigoryan Guitar Sharon Grigoryan Cello
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Sharon Grigoryan has been the cellist with the Australian String Quartet since 2013, and has been invited to be Guest Principal Cellist with the Melbourne, Adelaide and Tasmanian Symphony Orchestras. She is the current Artistic Director of the Barossa, Baroque and Beyond music festival, which recently completed its fifth year. In 2019 Sharon curated a chamber music series, Live at the Quartet Bar, for the Adelaide Festival Centre, and made her debut as a radio presenter on ABC Classic. Regarded as a wizard of the guitar, Slava Grigoryan has forged a prolific reputation as a classical guitar virtuoso. Born in Kazakhstan, he immigrated with his family to Australia in 1981 and began studying the guitar with his violinist father Edward at the age of 6. By the time he was 17 he was signed to the Sony Classical Label. His relationship with Sony Classical, ABC Classic in Australia, ECM in Germany and his own label Which Way Music has led to the release of over 30 solo and collaborative albums – four of which have won ARIA Awards – spanning a vast range of musical genres. Since 2009 Slava has been the Artistic Director of the Adelaide Guitar Festival. Lunchtime Concert Slava Grigoryan guitar Sharon Grigoryan cello Friday 25 September, 1:10pm Throughout, Bach’s contrapuntal genius shows in his ability to project multiple PROGRAM voices and implied harmonies with what is often considered a single-line Jobiniana No. 4 Sergio Assad instrument. Maurice Ravel’s Pièce en forme de Habanera was actually originally written as a Sarabande from Cello Suite No. 6 J.S. Bach Vocalise-étude in 1907. In its original form, it is a particularly demanding and virtuosic piece with staccato passages, portamenti, trills and sweeping scales. Yet, it brilliantly displays Ravel’s ability to compose for and demonstrate the possibilities Pièce en forme de habanera Maurice Ravel of the human voice. It appeared in a collection of vocalises assembled by A. L. arr. Slava Grigoryan Hettich and it may have been for this specific purpose that Ravel composed the piece. Perhaps as a means of making it more accessible, Ravel transcribed the Allemande from Cello Suite No. 1 J.S. Bach Vocalise for cello and piano. Since then, it has appeared in transcriptions for several other instruments. Ngeringa Edward Grigoryan The fascination of French composers for Spanish music dates back to Bizet’s Carmen and Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole, and was explored even more by Chabrier, Debussy and Ravel. Ravel’s connection to Spanish music, however, was Spiegel im Spiegel Arvo Pärt less a fancy and more a matter of heritage. His mother was of Basque descent and arr. Slava Grigoryan grew up in Madrid. She often sang to him folk songs as a child. Interestingly, the Five Tonadillas Enrique Granados habanera which Ravel here chose as the Spanish influence of this piece actually arr. Slava Grigoryan has its origins in France itself. The French contradanza was the basis of the development of the habanera in Cuba during the 19th century, from whence it traveled back to France via Spain. The distinctive habanera rhythm is present throughout much of the piece and against this the cello weaves its seductive Sergio Assad’s Jobiniana No. 4 is the last in a series of tributes to Antonio melody, whose character demands that the performer mask its difficulties in ease Carlos Jobim the legendary Brazilian musician who was the main force behind of execution. the creation of the Bossa Nova style. It was commissioned by Shin Ichi Fukuda as part of one of his projects on Brazilian music. For the same project, Assad “I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played. This also arranged several of Jobim’s pieces for cello and guitar. one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comforts me. I work with very few elements— with one voice, with two voices. I build with the most primitive Bach most likely composed his Six Suites for unaccompanied cello, BWV 1007– materials—with the triad, with one specific tonality.” - Arvo Pärt 1012, while serving as Kapellmeister at the court of Prince Leopold in Cöthen between 1717 and 1723. Precise dating is difficult because they survive, not in Pärt’s words are exemplified by the sparse musical material of his 1978 work Bach’s own hand, but in a copy made later in Leipzig by his second wife, Anna Spiegel im Spiegel. Initially, the melody consists of only two notes. Another note is Magdalena Bach. It is likely that the Suites were written either for Christian added with each subsequent phrase, creating the illusion of an endless continuum. Ferdinand Abel or Christian Bernhard Linigke, both accomplished cellists and Granados’s Tonadillas en estilo antiguo (ballad tunes of Castille - in the ancient Cöthen residents. style) were to a great extent inspired by the paintings of Goya—Granados was an Though appreciated in some circles, as Forkel’s 1802 Bach biography makes excellent painter and owned some of Goya’s works. A tonadillo is a theatre song, clear, the Suites fell into quasi-oblivion along with much of Bach’s music in the originally accompanied by a small orchestra or a guitar, and in the eighteenth decades following his death. Bach’s celebrated biographer Philipp Spitta gave century tonadillas were frequently sung by a singer in costume between the acts of them their due for their “serene grandeur” in his monumental study (1873–80), plays, as a sort of vocal intermezzo. The range of mood in these songs is varied: but they remained little known by the general public until they were championed passionate, despairing, coy and teasing. Only one is written in the bass clef, and by Pablo Casals in the early twentieth century. three were dedicated to the celebrated Catalan soprano Maria Barrientos (whose recording remains a benchmark). Composed in 1911–13, the tonadillas were Bach’s forward-looking exploration of the cello’s potential unfolds within the written ‘in the old style’, and are a nostalgic evocation of the working-class traditional configuration of the Baroque suite, which consisted of old-style neighbourhoods of nineteenth-century Madrid. The word majo (and its feminine dances in binary form—allemande, courante, sarabande, and gigue—with a maja) refers to the artisans living in such districts of Madrid as Lavapiés and the newer-style optional dance movement, or Galanterie, interpolated before the area around the church of San Antonio de la Florida—the word simply means final gigue. These interpolated dances in his cello suites consist of minuets, ‘pretty’, except when it is applied, as in these songs, to the lower-class characters bourrées, or gavottes, and he prefaced each of the Suites with a Prélude. who lived in these places. Throughout, Bach’s contrapuntal genius shows in his ability to project multiple PROGRAM voices and implied harmonies with what is often considered a single-line Jobiniana No. 4 Sergio Assad instrument. Maurice Ravel’s Pièce en forme de Habanera was actually originally written as a Sarabande from Cello Suite No. 6 J.S. Bach Vocalise-étude in 1907. In its original form, it is a particularly demanding and virtuosic piece with staccato passages, portamenti, trills and sweeping scales. Yet, it brilliantly displays Ravel’s ability to compose for and demonstrate the possibilities Pièce en forme de habanera Maurice Ravel of the human voice. It appeared in a collection of vocalises assembled by A. L. arr. Slava Grigoryan Hettich and it may have been for this specific purpose that Ravel composed the piece. Perhaps as a means of making it more accessible, Ravel transcribed the Allemande from Cello Suite No. 1 J.S. Bach Vocalise for cello and piano. Since then, it has appeared in transcriptions for several other instruments. Ngeringa Edward Grigoryan The fascination of French composers for Spanish music dates back to Bizet’s Carmen and Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole, and was explored even more by Chabrier, Debussy and Ravel. Ravel’s connection to Spanish music, however, was Spiegel im Spiegel Arvo Pärt less a fancy and more a matter of heritage. His mother was of Basque descent and arr. Slava Grigoryan grew up in Madrid. She often sang to him folk songs as a child. Interestingly, the Five Tonadillas Enrique Granados habanera which Ravel here chose as the Spanish influence of this piece actually arr. Slava Grigoryan has its origins in France itself. The French contradanza was the basis of the development of the habanera in Cuba during the 19th century, from whence it traveled back to France via Spain. The distinctive habanera rhythm is present throughout much of the piece and against this the cello weaves its seductive Sergio Assad’s Jobiniana No. 4 is the last in a series of tributes to Antonio melody, whose character demands that the performer mask its difficulties in ease Carlos Jobim the legendary Brazilian musician who was the main force behind of execution. the creation of the Bossa Nova style. It was commissioned by Shin Ichi Fukuda as part of one of his projects on Brazilian music. For the same project, Assad “I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played. This also arranged several of Jobim’s pieces for cello and guitar. one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comforts me. I work with very few elements— with one voice, with two voices. I build with the most primitive Bach most likely composed his Six Suites for unaccompanied cello, BWV 1007– materials—with the triad, with one specific tonality.” - Arvo Pärt 1012, while serving as Kapellmeister at the court of Prince Leopold in Cöthen between 1717 and 1723.