Program

• Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Souvenir d’un lieu cher for violin & piano, Op. 42

• Herbert Howells, Rhapsodic Quintet for clarinet & strings, Op. 31 (1919)

• Stephen Albert, To Wake the Dead: Six Sentimental Songs and an Interlude after Finnegans Wake for soprano, flute, clarinet, violin, cello & piano

• Louis Vierne, Piano Quintet in c minor, Op. 42 (1917)

Tchaikovsky shares misty reflections of a dear place, and Howells contemplates an England, and a way of life, destroyed by the First World War. Vierne’s epic, late-Romantic treasure is a powerful and emotionally charged work conceived as a votive offering for his son who was killed in action. Stephen Albert adapts James Joyce’s nearly incomprehensible text – with its wordplay, dreamlike ambiguity, and half-remembered fragments – into a moving exploration of love, loss, and the cyclical nature of life itself.