The performance will be live-streamed worldwide in HD on RTÉ Culture and broadcast live on RTÉ lyric fm.

Programme:
Sebastian Adams
2016.4

Ravel
Pavane pour une infante défunte
(Pavane for a Dead Princess)

Haydn
Symphony No. 83, ‘The Hen’

Respighi
Gli uccelli (The Birds)

The antique and the avian prove amiable bedfellows in this programme of delightful contrasts.

Commissioned by RTÉ lyric fm and first heard in 2017, Sebastian Adams’ 2016:4 takes the Overture to Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro as the starting point for a vital new work that aims ‘to evoke the same feelings as its model: an irrepressible sense of the joy of being alive!’

Evoking the slow, processional quality of the pavane, a dance popular in Europe’s royal courts during the 16th and 17th centuries, Ravel’s watercolour-delicate Pavane pour une infante défunte (Pavane for a Dead Princess) is a fantasy for a lost age of refinement and poise with the most fragile and beautiful of melodies.

Haydn’s Symphony No.83 takes its nickname – The Hen – from an early exchange between a ‘clucking’ oboe and violin in its first movement. Which is where the association with poultry begins and ends in a piece marked by painterly contrasts of light and shade in one of Haydn’s most animated of symphonies.

A charming exercise in musical mimicry, Respighi’s five-movement suite Gli uccelli (The Birds) pays homage to composers of the 17th and 18th centuries as it memorably brings to singing life a dove, hen, nightingale and cuckoo with captivating virtuosity.

WATCH: www.rte.ie/culture
LISTEN: https://www.rte.ie/lyricfm/the-lyric-concert-with-paul-herriott/