Details
Palmers Green URC Church
Fox Lane
Palmers Green
Enfield
London
N13 4AL
England
Programme
Felix Mendelssohn – Der Schönen Melusine, Op.32: Märchen
Ludwig van Beethoven – Piano Concerto no.1 in C major, Op.15
~ Interval ~
Owen Leech – The wind in the ash...
Joseph Haydn – Symphony no.99 in E-flat major, Hob I:99
Performers
Angela Brownridge – piano
Owen Leech – Conductor
North London Sinfonia
Programme Note
For our summer concert, we are delighted to welcome the distinguished and internationally acclaimed pianist Angela Brownridge as our guest soloist in Beethoven’s wonderful Piano Concerto No. 1. Despite its numbering, it was actually the composer’s third attempt at the genre and he himself gave the first performance in Vienna in 1795.
Beethoven’s great teacher Haydn would recently have returned from the second of his triumphant residencies in London for which he composed his final twelve symphonies, known as the ‘London Symphonies’. Number 99 had actually been composed in Vienna in preparation for the second trip and is one of the finest and most fully scored of the twelve – the first of his symphonies to feature clarinets.
Mendelssohn’s dramatic overture, whose full title translates as ‘Overture to the Legend of the Fair Melusine’ has an unusual origin in that it was written as a creative repost to a piece of music that ‘he disliked exceedingly’ - namely the overture to the now more or less forgotten Conradin Kreutzer’s opera Melusina. In European folklore and mythology Melusine is a water spirit. W
e are also excited to be giving the UK premiere of our conductor Owen Leech’s The wind in the ash.., a troubled pastoral inspired by a poem by the American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay in which childhood memories of idyllic beach holidays on Cape Cod are stirred