Louise Kemény, Anna Milder-Hauptmann, Richard Mühlfeld and me - this Sunday at Conway Hall

This Sunday (8 April 2018) I will be giving the pre-concert talk at Conway Hall in advance of a concert where soprano Louise Kemény, clarinetist Max Welford, cellist Brian O'Kane and pianist Will Vann are performing an attractive programme of music ranging from Schubert's Der Hirt auf dem Felsen through Brahms' Clarinet trio to music Zemlinsky and Marx.

My pre-concert talk picks up on the strong personalities running through the programme, soprano Anna Milder-Hauptmann, for whom Schubert wrote Der Hirt auf dem Felsen, the clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld whose clarinet playing brought Brahms out of retirement, Johannes Brahms himself who not only wrote four works for Mühlfeld but would be a keen supporter of the young Alexander Zemlinsky.

Another character sits in the background, Zemlinsky would be linked to Schoenberg in a number of ways (marital ties as well as compositional links), and Schoenberg's ground-breaking Pierrot Lunaire would have an intriguing pre-figuring in Joseph Marx's settings of poetry from the same set.

Full details from the Conway Hall website.