Other Concerts:
Beethoven Cello 3 16th May 2022 St. Mary’s Church Map
This is the final concert in a series of three, presenting all the sonatas for cello and piano by Beethoven, in honour of the 250th anniversary of his birth in 1770. The two previous concerts in our last season were full of passionate, beautiful, exhilarating and virtuosic playing and audience members lucky enough to be present at those events will need little persuading to attend this final chapter in such a remarkable odyssey.
Cellist Karel Bredenhorst and pianist Simon Callaghan have been our perceptive guides on this journey and the programme will open with the Viennese master’s final essay, the second of the two late opus 102 sonatas dedicated to his long time supporter Countess Marie Erdödy. The programme ends with the ‘middle’ cello sonata of the five which Beethoven dedicated to Baron Ignaz von Gleichenstein, a German aristocrat and amateur cellist who was, like the Countess, a close friend and a significant patron. It would seem that these two works were of great personal significance to the composer, written to honour people for whom he felt considerable affection. Beethoven’s family life was notoriously unstable, a tempestuous bond with an alcoholic and demanding father, an often dysfunctional relationship with his brothers and particularly with his nephew Carl, and an always chaotic romantic narrative. With this lack of a centre to his emotional life, his connection to patrons – those people of influence who truly believed in him – perhaps made those relationships something of a fulcrum in his life.
Richard Sisson
Ludwig van Beethoven – Sonata in D Op 102 No.2
Gabriel Fauré – Selection of short pieces
I. Après un rêve Op 7 No.1
II. Sérénade Op 98
III. Romance Op 69
IV. Papillon Op 77
Claude Debussy – Sonata
Ludwig van Beethoven – Sonata in A Op 69
Simon Callaghan -
Karel Bredenhorst -