Essence
CPE Bach - Flute Sonata in E Minor (Wq. 124 H. 551)
I. Adagio
II. Allegro
III. Menueto
Martinů – Flute Sonata H. 306
I. Allegro Moderato
II. Adagio
Elena Yeo, flute
Beethoven - Violin Concerto in D Major Op. 61
I. Allegro ma non troppo
II. Larguetto
III. Rondo
Archie Lamont-Bowden, violin
Elena Yeo
Elena Yeo is an undergraduate flute performance major at the University of Auckland, where she studies under the guidance of Dr Luca Manghi. She is incredibly excited to share tonight's program with the audience and simply hopes they enjoy the music as much as she loves preparing it.
Archie Lamont-Bowden
Archie is an undergraduate student of violin performance at the University of Auckland under the tutelage of Mark Bennett. He enjoys a wide range of music performance including chamber music, solo repertoire, and orchestral playing. His love and dedication to classical music started from a young age and he believes it has a special power to move people beyond themselves. This underpins his interpretive decisions.
Camila De Oliveira
Camila De Oliveira is a Brazilian pianist and educator who began her musical journey at the age of six. Camila completed her undergraduate studies in piano performance at the Faculdade de Artes Alcântara Machado in Brazil. She later broadened her musical horizons with a Postgraduate Diploma and a Master’s degree in Piano Performance with First Class Honours from the University of Auckland in 2021.
Currently pursuing doctoral studies at the University of Auckland, Camila’s research focuses on ergonomically scaled piano keyboards. A passionate collaborative pianist, she has performed with the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra and is a founding member of the Auckland Chamber Music Collective. Camila also teaches piano and chamber music at the University of Auckland. Her career reflects her commitment to both performance and education, as well as her dedication to fostering diversity and inclusion in music.
Programme Notes
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714–1788) is the second surviving son of J.S. Bach. His Flute Sonata in E minor (Wq. 124, H. 551) was composed around 1735 during his university studies in Frankfurt, representing a key early chamber work from the bridge era between the late Baroque and the emerging Classical "sensitive style."
The Flute Sonata was composed in 1945 for George Laurent who was the principal flute of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1918 to 1952. Martinů was born and raised in rural Czechoslovakia but spent half of his life away from his homeland. He moved to Paris in the 1920's for artistic reasons and then to the USA to escape from occupied Europe. Although successful in America he never lost his love of his native country and although he didn't return directly after the war (due to the death of friends and his mother) he eventually left the USA in 1953. Martinů never really settled anywhere, but lived briefly in various locations across New England, including Cape Cod, where the Flute Sonata was composed.
The four taps that open Beethoven’s Violin Concerto represent one of the most surprising and audacious ideas that the composer ever committed to paper. What was he thinking? Are they an echo of the military music that emanated from the French Revolution and heard all over Vienna during those warlike years? Are they setting the tempo, like those audible 1-2-3-4 counts that jazz musicians rely on? Are they a suggestion of menace or coming thunder? A way to attract the audience’s attention? Or a tune?
What makes Beethoven’s concerto different from all the other violin concertos of his time is its enormously enlarged sense of space. With four symphonies behind him, he now thought instinctively in the extended paragraphs of symphonic structure and was able to create a broad horizon within which his themes could be extended in leisurely fashion and adorned by graceful elaborations from the soloist. The four drum taps are a theme, or at least a crucial part of a theme, to be taken up by the soloist and the orchestra at various points, sometimes soft, as at the opening, sometimes brutally loud, and always highly distinctive. The other themes are elegant, often built out of rising or falling scales and sustaining a calm dignity.
The slow movement is a group of variations on a theme of surpassing simplicity and beauty. When the theme is first introduced, the soloist is offered only ornamentations up to this point. Then Beethoven introduces a second theme, even more serene than the first. The Rondo’s catchy theme releases a burst of energy and showcases Beethoven's ability to modulate to extraordinary distant key (A flat major) and still return to D Major to a joyful conclusion.
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