Great Romantics 2022

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Dora Pejačević
Piano Quintet in B minor, op. 40

Johannes Brahms
Trio for Violin, Horn and Piano in E-flat major, op. 40

Born into Croatian nobility and cosmopolitan influence, Dora Pejačević was a pioneer of fin de siècle sounds in her home country of Hungary. Though largely unknown for a century after her death - and rarely programmed in Australia - she is without doubt one of the most significant musical voices of the early twentieth century.

In Pejačević's Piano Quintet, we hear the influence of Richard Strauss, one of her contemporaries: it's rhapsodic, lyrical, opulent, luxuriantly harmonied and effusively Romantic.

One of the best-known chamber pieces, Johannes Brahms' Horn Trio is decidedly un-Romantic in structure and colour. Brahms bore a perpetual fondness for the titular instrument, which he played as a youth; in this trio, the violin and piano are joined by a horn instead of the conventional cello.

Brahms opens with a leisurely andante instead of a fast-paced sonata, which gives way to a movement marked mesto (sorrowful). The composer's mother had died just a few months earlier; from the depths of the piano rises a mournful elegy. Then, in a complete contrast, the final movement is a hunting theme, of gallopingly high spirits and off-beat accents - as befits a horn.

Featuring the CSO Chamber Ensemble.

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