Saturday 18 February 2006 at 19.45, Purcell Room South Bank Centre, Royal Festival Hall, London SE1 8XX Box Office: 08703 800 400; Online: www.rfh.org.uk; Tickets £10, £13 Anda Anastasescu (piano); Ciprian Ilie (trumpet); Anatol Vieru (piano); Nicholas Carpenter (clarinet); Hu Kun (conductor) The festival is promoted by The London Schubert Players Trust (www.constantinsilvestri.com) Artistic Director: Anda Anastasescu Founded in 1989 by pianist Anda Anastasescu the London Schubert Players chamber orchestra has been greeted worldwide with enthusiasm and critical acclaim. On February 18th they are celebrating George Enescu’s 125th anniversary with the great composer’s Octet for Strings (1898) – un unsurpassed and emotional XX century masterpiece – along with spellbinding works by Anatol Vieru: the pastoral and imaginative Clarinet Quintet; and the extraordinary Eratosthenes’ Sieve (1969) - a ‘theatrical’ work in which the players speak as well as play. Well-known in Europe, the ‘Sieve’ sounds like a joke and uses quotations from Eugen Ionescu’s play ‘The Chairs’. It is a piece of musical Theatre of the Absurd and whose innovative techniques fascinated and influenced Schnittke. The programme opens with the effervescent, carnival-like Septet by Saint-Saens. Enescu said ‘Music should go from heart to heart’ and the Octet is testimony to his Credo. The 17 years-old Enescu, a larger-than-life figure with exceptional gifts for melodic invention and counterpoint, produces an unsurpassed alchemy of timbres with only eight string instruments and reaches for the sublime with his long, sensual melodic lines soaring to heights of nobility. His love for Romania is evident in the references to his country’s traditional music. By birth, Enescu inherited the rich folk tradition of the Danube basin with its sensual feeling for colour and sound, which in the words of Yehudi Menuhin - Enescu’s pupil for many years – ‘comes only to the born and indigenous musician; and nowhere in the world is there a stronger sense of belonging to the earth.’ Saint-Saens Septet for Piano, Trumpet and String Quintet Anatol Vieru Clarinet Quintet (UK Premiere) Anatol Vieru Eratosthenes’ Sieve for Piano, Clarinet and Strings (UK Premiere) Interval Enescu Octet for Strings Op. 7 The London Schubert Players Strings Piano Anda Anastasescu and Andrei Vieru (the composer’s son) Clarinet Nicholas Carpenter (principal clarinet with the London Philharmonic Orchestra) Trumpet Ciprian Ilie Conductor Hu Kun (in Enescu’s Octet) (the well-known violinist/conductor, former protege of Yehudi Menuhin) 'A Romanian Musical Adventure' Festival is supported by the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs/DRRP, the Romanian Embassy and the Romanian Cultural Centre in London.