Between Court and Folklore

The chamber concert Between Court and Folklore is an excellent opportunity to discover Italian, English and Greek chamber music from the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The works by Bottesini and Respighi reveal the style and temperament of composers from the Apennine Peninsula. Giovanni Bottesini wrote his Grand Quintetto in C minor in 1858. It is an extraordinary and outstanding composition by this Italian double bass virtuoso. Ottorino Respighi was one of the figures who breathed new life into the development of Italian instrumental music in the first decades of the twentieth century. His Suite No. 3 – Ancient Airs and Dances is one of the finest examples of this. It is a neoclassical composition based on Renaissance and early Baroque works for lute and guitar. Gustav Holst’s Brook Green Suite, composed in 1933, was written with young musicians in mind. The suite radiates warmth and neoclassical simplicity; the composer also refers in it to English folk melodies. Another example of English chamber music inspired by early folklore is Peter Warlock’s Capriol Suite created in 1926, one of the composer’s most famous works. It is a six-movement cycle of stylised Renaissance dances based on melodies from the sixteenth-century dance treatise Orchésographie by Thoinot Arbeau. At the end of the concert, we will listen to the work by the Greek composer Nikos Skalkottas: Five Greek Dances, based on his monumental cycle of 36 dances. It is also one of his most popular works. Composed between 1931 and 1936, the dances brilliantly combine authentic Greek folklore with modern compositional techniques.