Wednesday, February 12, 7pm | Monarch Club at Trilogy, Nipomo

Thursday, February 13, 4pm | Pear Valley Estate Wine, Paso Robles

Featuring Nancy Mathison, clarinet, Grace Seng and Valerie Berg-Johansen, violin, Andrew Grishaw, viola, Hilary Clark, cello

Clarinetist Nancy Mathison joins Symphony of the Vines to celebrate our 10th Anniversary Season with an exciting program for the musicians and audience alike. Enjoy the unique timbre of the clarinet accompanied by a string quartet in this delightful concert featuring great chamber works for the clarinet by Mozart et al.

Clarinetist Nancy Mathison joins a string quartet for great chamber music works by composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Gerald Finzi and Astor Piazzolla. The quintet includes musicians Grace Seng and Valerie Berg-Johansen, violin, Andrew Grishaw, viola, and Hilary Clark, cello.

We are pleased to present a Student Spotlight featuring Joseph Galicinao, horn musician from Pioneer Valley High School. Watch an interview with Joseph here: https://symphonyofthevines.org/educational/

Quintet in A Major for Clarinet and Strings, K.581 – Mozart

This program features Mozart’s Quintet in A Major for Clarinet and Strings, K.581. Mozart was one of the first composers to use the clarinet in a symphony. Mozart’s fascination with the clarinet late in life resulted from his friendship with the Austrian clarinet virtuoso Anton Stadler (1753-1812), one of the composer’s fellow Freemasons in Vienna.  It was for Stadler that Mozart wrote the Quintet, K.581.

Five Bagatelles, Opus 23 – Finzi

Gerald Finzi was an exceptionally interesting figure.  Trained in York and London, he was a sensitive and introspective man who eventually renounced the life of the city and moved with his wife to the countryside. Finzi’s Five Bagatelles took shape over a long period.  It appears that he began work on some pieces for clarinet and piano during the 1920s, when he was still a music student in London, and then set them aside.  He returned to his sketches nearly two decades later, during World War II. Finzi was a pacifist, but he understood what was at stake during that war, and he spent the war working for the Ministry of War Transport in London.  In 1941 he returned to his early sketches and composed the first three bagatelles, adding a fourth in 1942.  These were premiered in January 1943, but when it came time to publish this music, Finzi’s publisher felt that the four pieces needed a fast finale, so Finzi composed the concluding Fughetta. The Five Bagatelles have become one of Finzi’s most popular compositions, and they are heard at this concert in an arrangement by Christopher Alexander for clarinet and string quartet.

Oblivion – Piazzolla

Astor Piazzolla was a fabulously talented young man, and that wealth of talent caused him some confusion as he tried to decide on a career path.  Very early he learned to play the bandoneon, the Argentinian accordion-like instrument that uses buttons rather than a keyboard, and he became a virtuoso on it. He gave concerts, made a film soundtrack, and created his own bands before a desire for wider expression drove him to the study of classical music. In 1954 he received a grant to study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, and it was that great teacher who advised him to follow his passion for the Argentinian tango as the source for his own music.

Piazzolla returned to Argentina and gradually evolved his own style, one that combines the tango, jazz, and classical music. In his hands, the tango–which had deteriorated into a soft, popular form–was revitalized. Oblivion comes from the sultry side of the tango. Over the melting rhythms of the opening, the haunting and dark main theme sings its sad song, and this will return in a number of guises.  Piazzolla varies the accompaniment beneath this tune, and the tango stays firmly within its somber and expressive opening mood.

Nightclub 1960 from l’histoire du tango – Piazzola (arr. Ulrich Nyffeler)

In the mid-1980s Piazzolla published what has become one of his most popular works, L’histoire du tango, a survey of how that form had evolved in four different decades across the twentieth century.  Piazzolla originally scored his “History of the Tango” for flute and guitar as a way of evoking the tango’s origins, but this music has been heard in countless arrangements, and at this concert its third movement, Night Club 1960, is heard in an arrangement for clarinet and string quartet. Night Club 1960 brings us the tango in transition toward something livelier, as contemporary Latin dance forms began to reinvigorate it.