We join internationally renowned pianist Paavali Jumpannen and violinist Jakub Jakowicz for an afternoon of music in the Adelaide Hills.

In a welcome return to UKARIA, the Finnish pianist Paavali Jumppanen joins forces with his friend and collaborator, renowned Polish violinist Jakub Jakowicz (whom UKARIA audiences will recall from his performances at Chamber Landscapes as part of the 2023 Adelaide Festival). The program’s first half juxtaposes two very different investigations of the piano-violin duo: Schubert’s formidable Fantasy, premiered in the year of his death, and the Polish violinist and composer Grazyna Bacewicz’s starkly atmospheric Sonata No. 5, written more than one hundred years later.

In the second half, we join Paavali and Jakub for the afternoon’s pièce de résistance, Ernest Chausson’s Concert for Violin, Piano and String Quartet. A nineteenth-century take on the seventeenth-century concerto grosso, Chausson’s monumental work combines chamber music sensibilities with a double-concerto profile, intensifying the musical drama and bursting out of the salon atmosphere that Schubert and Bacewicz’s sonatas inhabit. Dedicated to the virtuoso Belgian violinist Eugene Ysaÿe – a member of Chausson’s coterie in Paris – the Concert is an exercise in imaginative experimentation. The music demands agility, flexibility and humour from its performers, who are asked to shape-shift between roles and rise to its virtuosic heights.