Australian Haydn Ensemble: Beethoven’s Eighth

When

Duration

Location

Glasshouse Theatre

Glasshouse Port Macquarie presents:

Australian Haydn Ensemble: Beethoven’s Eighth

“It was a marvellous performance by the seven instrumentalists which did more than ample justice to Beethoven in this powerful rendition.” – Sounds Like Sydney 2024

Ah, those summer nights in Eastern Europe, 1812.

A week after Napoleon invades Russia, Ludwig van Beethoven almost certainly says “Yes, tonight Josephine” to the love of his life, the unhappily married and recently jilted but socially impossible match, Countess Jozefina Brunszvik. Three days later he pours forth - with the pencil (!) he souvenired from the tryst - the ten little pages of hopeless devotion that have spawned thousands of pages of academic speculation. He hastily concludes in order to make the next post, then scrunches them in his pocket for the rest of his life.

This superb program revolves around the tantalising enigma of the “Immortal Beloved” letters. Young Sydney composer Ella Macens, whose tender and expressive work with the Goldner and Flinders quartets has demonstrated a special affinity with chamber strings, embraces baroque tuning with a new commission inspired by Ludwig’s passionate declarations.

Exactly nine months after the clandestine Spa-town rendezvous, the countess bore a daughter that she christened Minona (hint: spell it backwards). No paternity mystery shrouds the other fruit of the encounter though, Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony, whose gestation period was considerably shorter. This utterly delightful homage to Haydn, so full of wit and musical slapstick, is light-years from the mindset of the letters, even though he started composing it then and there in the same hotel room.

Is that why he didn’t make it to the post office? Heard in the Ensemble’s by now familiar “unplugged” style, it’s guaranteed to banish frustration and consternation to your back pockets too.

Also on the bill, the remarkable chamber arrangement of Mozart’s G minor Symphony No. 40 by Vincenzo Cimador, which distils the symphony’s brooding drama into the intimacy of a septet, and one of the very first string sextets ever written, Boccherini’s Op. 24 No. 4 in F minor, a sumptuous masterpiece that deserves classic status.

Repertoire/Program

MOZART
Symphony No. 40 in G Minor arr. Cimador (1820)

BOCCHERINI
String Sextet in F Major, Op. 23 No. 6

ELLA MACENS
String Sextet (World Premiere - New Commission)

BEETHOVEN
Symphony No. 8 in F Major Op. 83
arr. F.W. Crouch (1821)

Part of Glasshouse SELECT 2025 Theatre Program

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