6:30pm-7:05pm on Saturday 28 March
Times shown are in GMT (UTC +0) up to the 26th March. For events on or after 27th March times are in BST (UTC +1).
West Road Concert Hall, 11 West Road, CB3 9DP
Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto (1935) is one of those rare works that simultaneously commands great popular love from audiences and occupies a prime position among the masterpieces of dissonant high musical modernism. It is also a work situated at a perplexing stylistic interstice: between the Romantic generosity of Wagner and Mahler and the radical atonality of Schoenberg and Webern, Berg’s ‘classmates’ of the Second Viennese School. Acknowledging that the Violin Concerto’s fundamental musical argument might well involve a case of consciously crafted synthesis between seemingly irreconcilable musical tendencies, this short talk will take the audience on a journey of discovery, one that charts the relationship between the music’s rich surface and the hidden features the composer built into his most enigmatic and enduring score.
This talk will be followed by a concert given by the City of Cambridge Symphony Orchestra in which the Berg violin concerto will be performed by Michael Foyle. Tickets for the concert can be obtained here: https://ccso-online.org.uk/
