HOW often do you get the opportunity to hear Mahler’s only surviving instrumental chamber work or one of the first works ever composed for Piano Quartet? 

Nadsa concert’s final performance of the season next Friday will offer just that… and more! 

It will be  a concert of contrasts at Newton Abbot’s Courtenay Centre this Friday (April 21), bridging the late Classical to late Romantic eras, and offers us insight into how four renowned composers successfully rose to the challenge of melding the piano and strings.

The Rossetti Ensemble was created in 2018 from long-standing collaborations between pianist John Lenehan, violinist Sara Trickey, violist Sarah-Jane Bradley and cellist Tim Lowe. 

They are four superb musicians with international experience and ‘a simply stunning display of ensemble playing’. They have chosen to bring a programme of drama, intensity, and wonderful melodies – late Mozart and Schumann, early-style Bridge and early Mahler.

The ensemble’s musicians come with their own special history. Sara Trickey is an award-winning solo violinist and chamber musician. She studied at the Royal College of Music, at Cambridge University (where she achieved a double starred First) and at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. 

Sarah-Jane Bradley, viola, following her debut at the Wigmore Hall in 1997, has established a distinguished international reputation as a soloist and chamber musician. 

Cellist, Tim Lowe, made his cello debut aged 11 playing the Saint-Saëns concerto at York Minster. He has performed in all the major venues in the UK, and works as a soloist and chamber musician throughout Europe. Pianist John Lenehan’s performances and recordings have been acclaimed throughout the world. Collaborating with many leading instrumentalists, he is recognised as an outstanding accompanist and chamber musician. He has also made more than sixty CDs – most recently the fourth volume of a complete edition of John Ireland’s piano music (on Naxos).

Their recital will start with Mozart’s Piano Quartet in G minor, K478. Written in 1785, it was almost the first ever piano quartet. Beethoven just beat him to it! 

At the time, Mozart’s commissioned work was considered too difficult to play, and, needless to say, the commission was not repeated!

Composed in 1910, it was works like Phantasy for Piano Quartet H 94 that contributed to Frank Bridge’s success as a composer. A contemporary of Bridge, composer Dr. Ernest Walker said, “I know of few things in British Chamber Music more satisfying than Bridge’s Phantasy for Piano Quartet.’ Benjamin Britten wrote: ‘Sonorous yet lucid, with clear, clean lines, grateful to listen to and to play.’

Mahler’s Quartet Movement, an unfinished (or lost?) early work, is his sole surviving piece of instrumental chamber music. A piece full of lyricism and yearning, he began working on it when he was 15 or 16 years old. It was performed two or three times in 1876, lost and not rediscovered until the 1960s.

The Rossetti Piano Ensemble will finish their performance with Schumann’s Piano Quartet in E flat, Op 47. 

This groundbreaking extrovert composition, written with his pianist wife, Clara, in mind, was completed in 1842, only weeks after his Piano Quintet. 

Its lyric song-like third movement has one of the most beautiful cello themes of the Romantic period, and the final vivace movement, full of rich texture and contrapuntal themes, brings the whole piece to an exuberant conclusion.

This concert is sponsored by Austins Department Store. It will take place at the Courtenay Centre, Newton Abbot, at 7.30pm on Friday, April 21. All tickets to be booked online in advance  see www.nadsa.co.uk for details.