The Rave & the Nightingale

A rare meeting of two of Australia’s finest ensembles.

Making their Adelaide Festival debut, the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra, under the inspired leadership of Sophie Rowell, joins us in a program rich with vivid musical exchange.

Elgar’s exuberant Introduction and Allegro for Strings opens proceedings with its vibrant interplay between solo quartet and string orchestra. In the year marking the 200th anniversary of Beethoven’s death, Heiliger Dankgesang (Holy Song of Thanksgiving), drawn from one of Beethoven’s profound late quartets, is a deeply personal meditation.

Adelaide composer Anne Cawrse revisits a previous John Bishop Memorial Commission, reimagining her work originally written for string quartet on a larger string orchestra canvas in Anon, from A Room of Her Own.

Finally, Matthew Hindson slips inside the delirious mind of Schubert in The Rave and the Nightingale as Schubert completes his final string quartet. As Schubert lay dying, what feverish dreams of music may have come to this master of melody had he lived in the twenty-first century?