Classical Salamanca ~ Mozart & Tchaikovsky

Welcome to our Classical Salamanca 2025 series, live in the Long Gallery.
Salamanca Arts Centre presents Mozart's Quintet in C major KV 515, and Tchaikovsky's 'Souvenir de Florence' Op70.

Saturday 9th August 2025
Doors & bar open at 7pm
Music commences at 7:30pm 

The Long Gallery
Level One, Salamanca Arts Centre
[ Enter via the main doors at 77 Salamanca Place, or take the Lift via the Courtyard ]

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In this concert of Mozart's Quintet in C major KV 515, and Tchaikovsky's Souvenir de Florence, 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 (Tchaikovsky 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:

Mozart Quintet in C major KV 515

Mozart reaches his most breathtaking peaks of chamber-music inspiration in his late works for five instruments, the four quintets for strings, K. 515, K. 516, K. 593, and the generally underrated K. 614, all scored for string quartet with a second viola, and the Quintet for clarinet and string quartet, K. 581.

The notion of a string quintet with two violas was new in the 1760s, when Mozart wrote his first such work, under the influence of Michael Haydn, creator of the first music of (relative) substance for this somewhat daring combination of instruments: daring simply because the taste of the age demanded thinner, leaner textures and if, as in Boccherini’s quintets with two cellos rather than two violas), the quartet ensemble was expanded it did not mean greater individual freedom for the instruments, but even less, with only the first violin and first cello bearing marked solo responsibilities.

After hearing in March of 1773 Michael Haydn’s first string quintet (in C), the 16-year-old Mozart took own first plunge into these barely-charted waters with his Quintet in B-flat, K. 174 – hardly music to stand with the mature masterpieces, but a work of some consequence, with a slow movement of great expressive appeal. That Mozart took the work seriously is evidenced by the fact that he rewrote its last two movements after a two-month long stay in Vienna, where he had been hugely impressed by the latest quartets of another Haydn, Michael’s older brother Joseph.

No concrete evidence exists as to the occasion(s) for which Mozart wrote the three string quintets of 1787, K. 515, K. 516 and K. 406/K. 516B, the last an arrangement of his Wind Octet, K. 388. The general feeling is that the composer wrote them on speculation, “hoping to sell manuscript copies to amateurs by subscription,” according to H.C. Robbins Landon.

It is known that Mozart and his friends played them for their own diversion, but what happened after that remains a mystery. These were by no means the first large-scale works that Mozart had created on spec, but unlike the piano concertos of 1783 (works of similar provenance), which were quickly sold, the quintets were hardly snapped up by the amateurs, who under any circumstances would have found them technically daunting. The composer was neither consciously catering to Vienna’s aristocratic salons nor being courted by them as the year 1787 waned. Thus, he was finally forced to sell them for a pittance to the publisher Artaria and Co.

As Charles Rosen has pointed out, Mozart turned to the quintet after having immersed himself in quartet-writing – “always directly after having written a series of quartets, as if the experience of composing for only four instruments prompted him to take up the richer medium.” So it was in 1773, and again in the 1780s, after he had composed his six quartets dedicated to Haydn and perhaps the grandest of his own quartets, the work in D, K. 499, completed in August of 1786.

The opening of K. 515, as the cello dances upward through the light accompaniment of its fellows, recalls the opening of Haydn’s “Bird” Quartet (Op. 33, No. 3), but thereafter the tone and texture are entirely Mozartian: the uniquely rich and mellow texture he created by emphasizing the inner voices (here, the two violas) that had been regarded as unnecessary “thickening” elements, even rude, by 18th-century listeners.

Rosen further notes, of K. 515’s opening, that after that mounting cello phrase, there is “the same inner accompanying motion, the same [as in Haydn’s “Bird”] placing of the first violin. Yet Haydn’s nervous rhythm is avoided: in place of his independent six-measure phrases – the motion broken abruptly between them – Mozart has a linked series of five-measure phrases with absolutely uninterrupted continuity.”

The slow movement is one of Mozart’s seemingly effortless heartbreakers – in essence a dialogue between first violin and first viola. The minuet is elegant but by no means lightweight, with a chromatically-tinged trio of grand proportions. The finale is a jubilant, elegant sublimation of feeling of the finest and strongest sort by a man who while yet only 30 years old was in the process of being discarded by those who had so recently set him on a pedestal.

Tchaikovsky’s Sextet Op 70 ‘Souvenir de Florence’

Movement 1. The music comes rushing in a flood. A tempest in the lower strings tosses the first violins around like a tiny boat in a storm.

Tchaikovsky adored Italy. He spent the long, harsh Russian winter in Rome, Florence, and Venice, seduced by the warmth of the sun, the music in the streets, the beauty of the men.

“I am under a clear blue sky,” he wrote, “where the sun is shining in all its magnificence. There’s no question about rain or snow, and I go out wearing nothing but a suit … a magical shift is finally happening to me.”

By 1890, the forty-something Tchaikovsky had finally achieved international fame. He was at the peak of his powers, pouring his full emotional self into every bar he wrote, not knowing that he had just three years left to live.

In Florence, he scratched out a simple duet for violin and cello. This germ gave birth to Souvenir de Florence. 

Movement 2. Hymn-like richness raises the curtain. Plucked strings—bringing to mind a lover’s serenading guitar—accompany a halting love song shared by violin and cello.

The title can mislead. In English, a “souvenir” is a physical object, kept as a reminder. In French, the word has a slightly different meaning. Souvenir is closer to “remembrance,” to “memory.”

Tchaikovsky found the relatively unusual form—two violins, two violas, two cellos— challenging. “There must be six independent and at the same time homogeneous parts,” he wrote. “It is frightfully difficult!”

His finished work balances these opposing forces: filling the hall with the weight of a much larger ensemble, each musician is pushed to play with the boldness of a soloist. Tchaikovsky’s music pulses with intensity, allowing no real moment of rest for any of the players.

Movement 3. A humble viola sings a simple folksong to the ensemble, who take it and turn the screw of intensity.

Tchaikovsky’s mother tongue is never far away. “Italy is beginning to cast her magic spell on me,” he wrote on one early trip. “But in spite of the enjoyments of life in Italy, in spite of the good effect it has upon me—I am, and shall ever be, faithful to my Russia.” 

Movement 4. The ensemble lets its hair down to a Slavonic beat, players sharing melodies in conceivable combination of solo, duo, and trio.

Tchaikovsky’s verdict on his work? “It's frightening to see,” he wrote, “how pleased I am with myself.”