Strelitzia Ensemble | Truth & Transcendence

Program 2 | Truth & Transcendence

David Bruce | Gumboots for String Quartet and Clarinet

Felix Mendelssohn | String Quartet in A minor Op. 13 No. 2

In this program, we explore two very different transcendent works of chamber music for Strings and Clarinet. Mendelssohn composed his passionate String Quartet in A minor when he was just 18, in 1827 - just months after the death of Beethoven. At the time, Mendelssohn was fascinated by Beethoven’s late string quartets, and their influence can be seen in his own quartet writing - in particular in his use of the kind of cyclical form that Beethoven’s late quartets first explored. Mendelssohn used a fragment of one of his songs, ‘Ist es wahr?’ (Is it true?) as a unifying motif that returns throughout the work. David Bruce’s work Gumboots, for String Quartet and Clarinet, was inspired by, as he says, the “paradox in music, and indeed all art - the fact that life-enriching art has been produced, even inspired by conditions of tragedy, brutality and oppression”. More specifically, Gumboots references Apartheid South Africa, and the tradition of ‘Gumboot Dancing’, in which brutally oppressed black mine workers, chained together, wore Gumboots while they worked in the flooded gold mines, because it was cheaper for the owners to supply the boots than to drain the floodwater from the mine. They developed a form of communication by slapping the boots and chains, and this later developed into a form of dance. These dances were joyous and vital, and Bruce includes five of these in the second part of his work, which he sees as a celebration of the resilience of the human spirit, and the rejuvenating power of dance. 

Performers

Lucy Warren | Violin

Caroline Hopson | Violin

Stuart Johnson | Viola

Eleanor Betts | Cello

Rowena Turner | Clarinet