CLASSIC CORNWALL

Start Date

23rd Aug 2011

End Date

27th Aug 2011

Location

Cornwall

Lineup

HARMONIEMUSIK

Details

Since 1992 Harmoniemusik has promoted this annual celebration of outstanding chamber music in the beautiful surroundings of the Parish Church at St Columb Major, an historic setting noted for its outstanding acoustic.

This is Harmoniemusik’s twentieth consecutive annual visit to St Columb Major where their ‘Classic Cornwall’ series has a loyal and enthusiastic following.

For this anniversary festival, programmes range from some of chamber music’s ultimate classics, the Schubert Octet (Saturday) and Mozart’s Oboe Quartet (Tuesday), to evocations of a paddle steamer journey in the Southern States of the USA in Jim Parker’s Mississippi Five (Thursday) and Darius Milhaud’s latin and samba inspired Scaramouche (Tuesday), often heard for two pianos, but here in the composer’s own version for alto saxophone.

Also featured are fine works by three British composers, Vaughan Williams, Madeleine Dring and William Hurlstone and one Australian composer – Percy Grainger - who is very much in the British tradition. These four quite different pieces illustrate Britain’s musical re awakening in the early and mid Twentieth Century.

No Festival would be complete without Harmoniemusik’s popular baroque and early classical repertoire, with a Telemann Quartet (Tuesday) a Vivaldi Concerto (Thursday) and Boccherini’s Flute Quintet (Saturday). Each a musical sorbet to complement some of the heady romanticism in this year’s programmes, not least in Balakirev’s intense single movement Octet for Piano, wind and strings from the mid Nineteenth Century (Saturday).