UKARIA
Experience the ACO in nature at the stunning UKARIA Cultural Centre in the Adelaide Hills.
With spectacular views of Mount Barker Summit through its glass-walled stage and exceptional acoustics, you’ll hear and feel every note.
Tickets on sale now via the UKARIA Cultural Centre website.
Program
Wanderers of the Night
Saturday 3 June, 4pm
In much the same way that a landscape is never the same twice, a piece of music is illuminated in new and unpredictable ways as it interacts with the environment in which it is heard. To open their inaugural UKARIA festival, the ACO weave a crepuscular tapestry of music from the Baroque to the present day, as the light recedes over the Mount Barker Summit.
Rising-star soprano Cathy-Di Zhang (who recently made her mainstage debut with Opera Australia in Mozart's Don Giovanni) joins the ACO as soloist in works by Osvaldo Golijov and Richard Strauss. The achingly beautiful 'Morgen!', together with selections from Haydn's Sunrise Quartet (Op. 74 No. 4), concludes the program, celebrating the renewal of light and life.
The Monkey Mountains
Saturday 3 June, 6pm
In 1941 Pavel Haas was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where he joined several other Moravian-Jewish composers including Viktor Ullman and Gideon Klein – all of whom were later executed in Auschwitz-Birkenau. 'Our will to create art has always been as strong as our will to survive,' Haas once said, but indeed it was Klein who managed to coax Haas out of his despair and back into composition.
Haas's String Quartet No. 2 From the Monkey Mountains (1925) is today considered one of the masterpieces of the twentieth century. Inspired by the Czech highlands near Brno, its four programmatic movements are reminiscences of times spent there during a summer vacation: 'Whether it is the rhythm of a broad landscape and birdsong, or the irregular movement of a rural vehicle; be it the warm song of a human heart or the cold silent stream of moonlight [...] it is always movement that governs everything,' the composer wrote. In this special arrangement, the original string-quartet instrumentation is expanded to provide the perfect showcase for the glorious forces of an eleven-piece ACO. In the first half, Richard Tognetti appears as soloist in Mozart's popular Turkish Violin Concerto (No. 5).
Franck's Violin Sonata
Sunday 4 June, 2.30pm
Written as a wedding present for the 28-year-old Belgian virtuoso Eugène Ysaÿe, César Franck's Sonata in A for Piano and Violin was first performed publicly from memory in almost total darkness at the Musée Modern de Peinture in Brussels (no artificial sources of light were permitted by the gallery authorities). Today it is celebrated not only as one of the most treasured works of the chamber repertoire, but also as one of the finest examples of cyclical form ever written.
In a French-focussed program exclusive to this festival, the ACO concludes the weekend with music by Rameau, Debussy, Ravel, and Boulanger, culminating with Franck's magnificent sonata, featuring Satu Vänskä as soloist in the ultra-high-definition acoustics of UKARIA.
