Residency showcase

The public concert of the Kuopio residency, and the one evening of it open to an audience. Guillermo Laporta and Josefina Urraca play in the Kamarimusiikkisali of the Kuopio Music Centre, on the second of the five days they spend at the conservatory next door.

Lili Boulanger's Nocturne opens: three minutes from 1911, one of only four short pieces she left for flute and piano. Two violin sonatas follow, both carried over to the flute and both begun in wartime. Debussy's in G minor was his last completed work, third of six sonatas he did not live to finish; he was at the piano for its premiere in Paris in May 1917, which turned out to be his final public appearance. Janáček started his in 1914, at the outbreak of war, then spent most of a decade reordering and rewriting it before letting it into print in 1922. Only the first movement is played here. Clara Schumann's Three Romances were written for violin and piano too. She finished them in 1853 and dedicated them to Joseph Joachim; they are among the last original works she completed.

Three short pieces come between the larger ones. Guillermo Laporta's Brown Leaves Moving follows the Debussy. Then two of Falla's Siete canciones populares españolas, taken apart and used the same way: Asturiana, the third of the set, after the Clara Schumann, and Nana, the fifth, before the Martin that ends the concert. Falla wrote the songs for voice and piano in 1914, and Luisa Vela sang the first performance at the Ateneo in Madrid in January 1915 with Falla accompanying. An asturiana is a song from Asturias, in the north of Spain, where CreArtBox runs Festival ADAR every August. Nana is a lullaby.

Two of the works were written for exactly this pair of instruments, and both were written to be competed with. Messiaen wrote Le Merle noir in March 1952 as the concours piece for the flute class of the Paris Conservatoire. Frank Martin's Ballade was the set piece for the Geneva competition of 1939, premiered there that September, and it closes the evening.