Classical Salamanca ~ Brahms & Schoenberg

Welcome to our Classical Salamanca 2025 series, live in the Peacock Theatre.
Salamanca Arts Centre presents Johannes Brahms' Quintet for Strings No 2 in G major Op 111 and Arnold Schönberg's Verklärte Nacht Op 4

Saturday 13th September 2025
Doors & bar open at 7pm
Music commences at 7:30pm 

The Peacock Theatre
Salamanca Arts Centre
[ Enter via the main doors at 77 Salamanca Place ]

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In this concert of Johannes Brahms' Quintet for Strings No 2 in G major Op 111 and Arnold Schönberg's Verklärte Nacht Op 4, Chamber Music leader, Peter Tanfield, leads an ensemble of some of Tasmania's best and most highly-regarded musicians, including:
(Violins) Peter Tanfield and Phoebe Masel
(Violas) Douglas Coghill and Damien Holloway,
(Celli) William Hewer and Alexandra Békés (Schönberg only).

Tickets are only $15+BF for School Students (up to 18 years of age). Adults' tickets are $39+BF, or $35+BF for concession card holders, with a further discount offered to SAC Associate members.

Peter Tanfield was born in England in 1961 and started the violin aged four. He studied in Germany, Israel, Switzerland and Holland where his teachers were Igor Ozim, Felix Andrievski, Alberto Lysy, Herman Krebbers and Yehudi Menuhin.
He was a prize-winner at The Carl Flesch International Competition, International Mozart Competition, International Bach Competition amongst others.   As soloist and chamber musician he has played throughout Europe, China, Japan, India, Canada, the Middle East, Africa, USA, and USSR. He has recorded numerous solo and chamber works for television and radio as well as CD. He has played for Chairman Deng in China and the Sultan of Oman.

As soloist Peter has appeared with many major orchestras; the Philharmonia, City of London Sinfonia, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, West German Radio Orchestra, Radio Symphony Orchestra of the RAI in Rome, Scottish Chamber Orchestra.
As concertmaster, he has had extensive experience working with BBC Philharmonic, RSO RAI Roma, West German Radio Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Some of the artists and composers he has worked and performed with: Astor Piazzolla, Charlie Watts, Pinchas Zukerman, Yehudi Menuhin, Charles Wuorinen, Arvo Paert, Graeme Koehne, Gary Carr, Itzhak Perlman.
Some of the conductors he has worked with are Carlo Maria Giulini, Claudio Abbado, Charles Dutoit, Louis Fremaux, Richard Hickox, Heinz Wallberg, Jun-Ichi Hirokami, John Adams, Oliver Knussen, Paavo Jaervi, Martin Brabbins, Gary Bertini, Georg Solti, Pierre Boulez, Simon Rattle.

Peter has been active as a teacher in Britain, Spain, Germany, Switzerland and Australia organizing, coordinating and delivering courses and chamber music programmes for festivals and youth organizations.
From 2002 to 2008 he was lecturer in violin and ensemble at the Tasmanian Conservatorium of Music, University of Tasmania. He was also Artistic Director of the Tasmanian Senior Youth Orchestra and the Derwent Symphony Orchestra, and has been Artistic Advisor to the Hobart Chamber Orchestra. Peter came to Australia in 1998 to lead the Australian String Quartet.  Until he left in November 2001 he dedicated himself to the quartet’s development and teaching at the university of Adelaide, expanding the ensemble’s national profile, making two films for the ABC and becoming the Artistic Director of the Adelaide Chamber Orchestra.

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This concert at Salamanca Arts Centre is supported by Arts Tasmania's 2025 Arts Projects Fund.
Salamanca Arts Centre is grateful for this support via Arts Tasmania and the Minister for the Arts.

Program Notes:

Saturday 13th September 2025
The Peacock Theatre

Brahms Quintet
Johannes Brahms intended for the String Quintet No. 2 in G Major, Op. 111 to be his final piece.

In a December, 1890 correspondence with his publisher, Simrock, the 57-year-old composer slipped in the message, “With this note you can take leave of my music, because it is high time to stop.” Around the same time, Brahms told a friend that he “had achieved enough; here I had before me a carefree old age and could enjoy it in peace.” In fact, Brahms soon came out of retirement to write a series of “Indian summer” works, including the Clarinet Trio, Op. 114 and the Op. 116–119 piano pieces. Regardless, the G major String Quintet stands as a monumental “bookend.” The piece’s initial sketches were conceived as a possible Fifth Symphony.

The resulting chamber work, scored for string quartet with an added viola, feels almost symphonic. The addition of a middle register voice results in tonal weight and depth, opening the door to a new, heroic scale.

A bold, swashbuckling statement in the cello launches the first movement into motion. Fighting its way through the ecstatic, pulsating lines of the other instruments (in 9/8 meter), this lowest voice emerges as a Herculean presence. The second theme, introduced by the viola, relaxes into a lilting Viennese waltz rhythm.

The Adagio second movement, set in D minor, begins with a viola duet propelled forward by the cello’s pizzicato. This melancholy music suggests the sombre, ghostly chorales of Schubert. It unfolds as a set of mysterious and restless variations. The final bars drift into quiet repose with the reassurance of D major.

As is typical of Brahms, the third movement is not a scherzo but, instead, a slower intermezzo in triple meter. Mysterious and autumnal, its gentle forward motion floats somewhere between a waltz and a minuet.

The joyful final movement erupts in wild, frolicking Hungarian folk dances. It’s the ultimate party music, reminiscent of the 21 Hungarian Dances which were so commercially profitable for Brahms. The development section teems with brilliant fugal counterpoint. The final moments feel increasingly carefree, culminating in a coda which surges forward with a sense of unabashed celebration.

Schönberg Verklärte Nacht 

While he was the leader of the musical revolution centred in Vienna in the early twentieth century, whose precepts led to completely new foundations for the composition of music, Arnold Schoenberg certainly possessed nothing of the personal aura of a revolutionary.  Born into a poor family of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and almost completely self-taught as a composer, he struggled most of his life to provide for his family as a teacher of music theory and composition.   He was a quiet, intellectual, and somewhat dogmatic man, and certainly realized that, for all of his wide reputation and approval by eminent musicians, he could never hope to earn a living from compositions, alone.  Audience and critics’ reactions to his challenging musical style saw to that.  He limped along from one teaching engagement to another.  The advent of the Third Reich put paid to his time in Vienna, and he had the perspicacity to move his family out very early on.  In the late 1930s they ended up in southern California, where he taught first at the University of Southern California, and then at UCLA.  Poor health dogged him for most of his life, and he retired on a very small pension, dying in 1951 in Los Angeles.

His youth and the period of his musical apprenticeship was thoroughly grounded in the chromatic harmony of Wagner and the structural integrity of Brahms—he adored them both.  So, naturally, his early efforts in musical composition were absolutely an outgrowth of the late Romantic traditions of conventional Germanic art.  Nevertheless, his innate sophistication led him to extend, push, and challenge these precepts.  So, his early style is somewhat of a bridge between the lush conventions of late romantic music, and the stark upheavals of the next century.   The first work that brought him recognition is, of course, Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), composed for string sextet and later arranged by him for string orchestra.

The work, inspired by a poem by the controversial poet, Richard Dehmel, lies in one continuous movement, although there are five somewhat subtle, but perceptible, sections that correspond to the poem’s five stanzas.  The dense weft of melodic lines, in a harmonic scheme that pushes the limits of tonality, creates a dark Teutonic mood so characteristic of fin-de-siècle Vienna.  And certainly, the work is a perfect complement to the poem, which like so much of the art and literature of the times, pretty much challenged the good, conservative folk of Vienna.  The art of Egon Schiele may come to mind in this context.

The poem concerns a troubled couple walking in the gloom and dark, the woman confessing her pregnancy by another man, her shame at her transgression, and her fear of thereby destroying her relationship with her true love.  The last stanza turns upbeat as her lover declares, no matter, the child will be ours.   The sexual content was controversial enough, but coupled with the music’s advanced harmonic idiom, it was sufficient to hinder the acceptance of what is clearly Schoenberg’s first masterpiece.  Soon enough, though, this little symphonic poem for chamber orchestra gained its rightful place as not only an invaluable marker along the road to musical modernity, but also as a testament to the intrinsic genius of the composer’s intellect and musicality.