The brilliant Sophie Rowell (violin) and Kristian Chong (piano) present a performance of Night Flight (2003) by Andrew Schultz in Melbourne in May 2016.
Monday 2 May 2016, 6 – 7pm, Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre, 31 Sturt Street, Melbourne, Victoria, 3006
Night Flight was originally written as the fourth movement from a larger sextet, called “Mephisto”, in 1990. The Ukrainian virtuoso Dmitiri Tkachenko, who had played the violin part in that work on several occasions, commissioned this transcription for violin and piano for concerts with Kristian Chong in London in November 2003. The piece is a danse macabre for the modern age. The idea for its frenetic energy came whilst taking off at night in an airplane and the work makes reference to the frantic and fantastic horse rides of Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz No. 2 and Schubert’s song, Erlkönig.
Who rides so late through the night and the wind?
It is the father with his child;
He folds the boy close in his arms,
He clasps him securely, he holds him warmly.
[Johann Goethe, Erlkönig, trans. Phillip Miller]
Image at top: William Morris Hunt, The Horses of Anahita or The Flight of Night (circa 1850)