The Model

Horror and Elegance with Hugh Tinney

€25 (€10 Students on the Door) / “Hugh Tinney at the piano was superb, playing the often very difficult music with consummate mastery, attentive to all the composer’s demands.” – The Irish Times (about the Dublin Hugo Wolf Festival)

The programme focuses on piano music in France in the 19th and early 20th century. Chopin’s music has its own special unchallenged place in the French repertoire.

The elegant and evocative Estampes (1903) gives impressions of exotic locations. It is in three movements: Pagodes, Une soirée dans Grenade and Jardins sous la pluie.

Gaspard de la nuit in three movements was composed in 1908. It is at once the most demanding and the most revolutionary of Ravel’s keyboard works, and altogether the most remarkable. Ondine is a water-nymph who seeks a mortal spouse in vain before disappearing in a spray of water drops. Le Gibet depicts an eerie scene at sunset as the corpse of a hanged man swings to and fro on the gibbet. Scarbo is the malevolent gnome who appears in the middle of the night furiously spreading fear and disorder.
Ravel said to a friend: “I wanted to make a caricature of romanticism, but perhaps I let myself be taken over by it”.

La Mandragore by the contemporary French composer Tristan Murail was composed in 1993 as an homage to Ravel. The mandragore is a Mediterranean plant which grows near gallows and from here is the connection to Le Gibet in Gaspard de la nuit.

Concert will be followed by a ‘Meet the Artists’ wine-reception.

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