YCAT x ANAM Chamber Symphonies

Alumni of London’s Young Classical Artists Trust join current musicians from the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM) for three works from three very different worlds: early twentieth-century Vienna, Shakespeare’s court of Naples and the last years of a composer’s life.

Arnold Schoenberg’s first Chamber Symphony was a turning point in music: a single, compact movement originally written for fifteen instruments, here in a version for just five, arranged by his student Anton Webern. Thomas Adès’s Court Studies distils six solo numbers from his opera The Tempest into a set of musical portraits of Shakespeare’s shipwrecked courtiers, from scheming Antonio to the grieving King of Naples.

Mieczysław Weinberg’s Chamber Symphony No.4 was the last piece he ever completed, written in 1992 when illness had left him housebound. A Polish-born refugee and friend of Shostakovich, Weinberg gives the clarinet a lamenting voice, before the finale turns to a folk melody and klezmer-inspired dance from his Jewish heritage. It is part dance, part lament, and a moving farewell.