Helen Vidovich & Olga Stezhko

Performers

Notes on the performers

Australian flautist Helen Vidovich works as a freelance orchestral and chamber musician throughout the UK and internationally. As an orchestral player she has performed at venues including the Sydney Opera House and Royal Albert Hall in London. Recent career highlights include work with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra. Helen auditioned successfully as an extra player for the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and Welsh National Opera, and in Australia has appeared on several occasions as a soloist with the Sydney Chamber Orchestra, including performances of Mozart’s Flute and Harp Concerto with harpist Marshall McGuire.

Helen completed postgraduate study at the Royal Academy of Music, London, following a Master’s degree at the Sydney Conservatorium. In 2006 she received an Australian Bicentennial Scholarship from King’s College London to assist her postgraduate studies in London. Her teachers have included Michael Cox (BBC Symphony Orchestra) and Sharon Williams (LSO). She has performed in masterclasses throughout Europe with international soloists including Jacques Zoon, Peter-Lukas Graf, Peter Lloyd, Philipe Bernold and William Bennett. Helen has a keen interest in contemporary music and regularly works with composers both as a soloist and within an orchestral context.

Olga Stezhko is an award-winning concert pianist and critically acclaimed recording artist. Her striking and idiosyncratic programmes often explore hidden connections between music, science, and history across the past four centuries.

Acclaimed by Classical Source in a Wigmore Hall review as ‘a supremely delicate master of her instrument’ who possesses ‘an extraordinary presence’, Olga has performed worldwide from the Barbican Hall in London to Salle Cortot in Paris to the Carnegie Hall in New York City.

Recent highlights include performances in Bridgewater Hall, Wigmore Hall, the Palermo Classica Festival, the Ulverston International Music Festival and a tour in Norway where Olga premiered her multimedia project ‘Red, Green, Blue’ and a new work for piano, chamber orchestra and narrator ‘Blooming’ by Kari Beate Tandberg, based on the book ‘The Unwomanly Face of War’ by Belarusian Nobel Prize laureate Svetlana Alexievich.

Olga is the winner of many international competitions and awards including the Grand Prix at the ‘Halina Czerny-Stefanska In Memoriam’ International Piano Competition in Poland and the First Prize at the Nikolai Rubinstein International Piano Competition in France.

Born in Minsk, Olga was educated in Belarus, Italy and the UK where she completed her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees with distinction at the Royal Academy of Music.

Olga’s debut album ‘Eta Carinae’ (Luminum Records) combined her passion for astronomy with music by Scriabin and Busoni and was hailed by the Gramophone Magazine as ‘an outstanding debut’ and ‘not a record for the faint-hearted but rather for those who enjoy dark and menacing regions of the mind’. Her second all-Debussy album ‘Et la lune descend’ (Palermo Classica) received unanimous critical acclaim in the publications including International Piano Magazine and BBC Music Magazine.

Helen and Olga are members of the Marsyas Trio (flute, cello, piano) – one of the UK’s foremost mixed chamber ensembles and the current Artist By-Fellows at Churchill College, University of Cambridge and FUAM Ensemble in Residence at the University of Leeds.

Programme

Programme notes

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach

Sonata in G major for flute and piano (‘Hamburger’)

1. Allegretto
2. Rondo

CPE Bach was a German Classical period composer and musician, the fifth child and second surviving son of Johann Sebastian Bach. He was an influential composer working at a time of transition between his father’s Baroque style and the Classical style that followed it. He was the principal representative of the empfindsamer Stil or ‘sensitive style’. The qualities of his keyboard music are forerunners of the expressiveness of Romantic music, in deliberate contrast to the statuesque forms of Baroque music.

Source: Wikipedia

Georges Hüe

Fantaisie for flute and piano 

French classical composer Georges Hüe (1858-1948) studied under the guidance of Charles Gounod and César Franck, excelling in composition. In 1879, he achieved notable recognition by winning the prestigious Prix de Rome with his captivating cantata, Médée. This accolade marked the beginning of Hüe’s promising career in the world of classical music.

Hüe showcased his talent for composing for the flute, with pieces such as the Fantaisie for flute and orchestra. Originally written in 1913 for flute and piano, this enchanting composition was later orchestrated in 1923. This piece was written for Adolphe Hennebains, legendary professor of the Paris Conservatory.

Source: Wikipedia

Albert Roussel

Pan (from Joueurs de Flûte Op.27)

Joueurs De Flute Op.27, was composed in 1924 for the flautist Louis Fleury. Each movement is based on the 4 mythical flute players, Pan, Tityre, Krishna and Monsieur de la Péjaudie.

‘Pan’ is named after the half-goat, half-man god of nature in Greek mythology, who is often depicted playing the flute, and after whom the panflute is named. The piece employs the Dorian mode (with flattened thirds and sevenths) that was used in ancient Greece.

Source: Wikipedia

Claude Debussy

Estampes for solo piano

1. Pagodes
2. La soirée dans Grenade
3. Jardins sous la pluie

Estampes (“Prints”), L.100, is a composition for solo piano by Claude Debussy. It was finished in 1903. The first performance of the work was given by Ricardo Viñes at the Salle Érard of the Société Nationale de Musique in Paris on 9 January 1904.

This three-movement suite is one of a number of piano works by Debussy which are often described as impressionistic, a term borrowed from painting. This style of composition had been pioneered by Ravel in Jeux d’eau written in 1901, and was soon adopted by Debussy (for example in the earlier numbers of Images), but Debussy did not himself identify as an impressionist.

Source: Wikipedia

Lili Boulanger

Nocturne for flute and piano

Lili Boulanger wrote the Nocturne aged eighteen, in 1911, originally scored for violin and piano. It shows, in its clean lines, lightish texture and the almost ironically sudden dismissal of its pseudo-romantic climax, a move back in tone towards the music of earlier French composers, while the little quotation at the end from Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune surely looks forward to a future in which Wagner would no longer hold the reins of power.

Source: Wikipedia

Johann Sebastian Bach

Toccata in E minor BWV 914 for solo piano

1. Adagio

The Toccata in E minor, BWV914, is a well-constructed and appealing work. Adagio is the third of four movements. The cadenza-like adagio is written over a descending bass line and is marked ‘Praeludium’ in one copy made by a Bach student, which leads us to think that it was perhaps an independent composition before being recycled as part of the toccata.

Source: Wikipedia

Francis Poulenc

Sonata for flute and piano

1. Allegro malinconico
2. Cantilena: Assez lent
3. Presto giocoso

The Sonate pour flûte et piano, FP 164, by Francis Poulenc, is a three-movement work for flute and piano, written in 1957.

The sonata was commissioned by the American Library of Congress and is dedicated to the memory of Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, an American patron of chamber music. Poulenc preferred composing for woodwinds above strings. He premiered the piece with the flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal in June 1957 at the Strasbourg Music Festival. The work was an immediate success, and was quickly taken up in the US, Britain and elsewhere and has been recorded many times. Critics have noted Poulenc’s characteristic “trademark bittersweet grace, wit, irony and sentiment” in the piece.

The flute sonata became one of Poulenc’s best-known works and is a prominent feature in 20th-century flute repertoire. It has a claim to be the most played of any work for flute and piano.

Source: Wikipedia