Spotlight Chamber Music Series – IV

The final concert of four in the Spotlight Chamber Music Series 2021 will feature three works for strings and piano.

It will open with Mahler’s sole surviving piece of instrumental chamber music, his Piano Quartet in A minor, written in the late 1870s while Mahler was still a teenager studying at the Vienna Conservatory (Conservatorium für Musik und darstellende Kunst der Gesellschaft für Musikfreunde). It was initially intended as the first of a multi-movement work, but was abandoned twenty-four bars into the second movement, a G minor Scherzo. The quartet was not published or performed until almost a century later.

A short, contemporary trio by Irish composer Finola Merivale, written in 2015, will follow. Brahms’ C minor Piano Quartet, the last published in the composer’s triptych of piano quartets, will conclude the programme. This work was, in fact, Brahms’ first attempt at this form, in the mid-1850s, when the composer was in his early 20s and smitten with the pianist Clara Wieck Schumann. This dramatic, emotionally turbulent and beautifully lyrical work is a veritable gem of the chamber music repertoire.

MUSICIANS, Mia Cooper – Violin, Cian Ó Dúill – Viola, Aoife Burke – Cello, Michael McHale – Piano

PROGRAMME

Mahler: Piano Quartet in A minor
Finola Merivale: ag fanacht, go chiúin (for Piano Trio)
Brahms: Piano Quartet in C minor, Op. 60

Tickets