Good afternoon music lovers,
We hope you are in the mood for some wonderful music from the Acacia Quartet. The concert is at 2:30 pm on Saturday August 6, at St Paul's Anglican Church in Narooma (rescheduled from July 9 ). Acacia will be playing quartets by Borodin and Shostakovich, as well as a specially commissioned piece by Australian composer Jessica Wells.
It might seem odd to be featuring two Russian composers and another Russian-themed work at a time when the world looks on in horror at what is happening in Ukraine. One reason is of course, is that this is wonderful music, another is that neither Alexander Borodin nor Dmitry Shostakovich were exactly poster-boys of their respective regimes.
One of Borodin's best-known works, the opera Prince Igor, has the eponymous Igor embark on an expansionist campaign, only to be ignominiously defeated by the Polovtsian Khan and return to Petersburg in disgrace. One can easily imagine that Borodin might have wished for the same fate to befall the current 'special military operation'.
Dmitry Shostakovich's Quartet No 8 is officially dedicated to the memory of the victims of the fascism and war, but his daughter Galina believed that he intended this to mean victims of totalitarianism in all its guises.
We hope you can join us,
Lada Marcelja
Artistic Director - Montague Visiting Artists
