Stir Cheat Sheet: 5 things to know about Vetta Chamber Music’s Romanticism Unleashed

The concert features guest artists from Barcelona: violinist Kai Gleusteen and pianist Catherine Ordronneau

By gail johnson    

Catherine Ordronneau (left) and Kai Gleusteen.

Vetta Chamber Music  presents Romanticism Unleashed on January 27 at 2 pm at West Point Grey United Church; January 28 at 7:30 pm at West Vancouver United Church; January 29 at 2 pm at Pyatt Hall; and January 30 at 7:30 pm at ArtSpring on Salt Spring Island

LOVE IS IN the air for Romanticism Unleashed, Vetta Chamber Music’s third concert in its 2022-23 season. Joining the ensemble’s artistic director, violin player Joan Blackman, are violinist Kai Gleusteen and pianist Catherine Ordronneau, a musical duo from Barcelona; violist Jacob van der Sloot, a member of Vancouver Symphony Orchestra; and Zoltan Rozsnyai, who has been VSO’s assistant principal cellist since 2001.

Romantic chamber music fills the program: Franz Schubert’s String Quartet No. 13 in A minor, D. 804, Op. 29 “Rosamunde”; Franz Liszt’s Après une lecture du Dante: Fantasia quasi Sonata; and Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E-flat major, Op. 44.

Here’s all you need to know about the show.

#1

Gleusteen and Ordronneau are an in-demand duo the world over. “Une pianiste pas comme les autres” (a pianist like no other”) is how Paris newspaper Le Figaro once described Ordronneau. A professor of piano and chamber music at Barcelona’s Liceu Conservatorio Superior de Música, she has performed with groups such as the Bay Atlantic Symphony, Toronto Sinfonietta, Lublin Philharmonic in Poland, and the Lebanon Philharmonic Orchestra, to name just a handful.

Outside of her solo work, Ordronneau has been performing with her partner, Canadian-born Gleusteen, for more than two decades. He has led Spain’s Gran Teatre del Liceu Symphony Orchestra and in the early 2000s was appointed professor at the Escuela Superior de Musica de Catalunya. He continues to perform as a soloist and recitalist across Europe, North America, and China. In 2011, he founded a chamber music festival in Spain called Kaimerata Concerts, which branched out to its second home on Denman Island, where it runs in the summertime. 

#2

Gleusteen plays a violin made by Giovanni Battista Guadagnini in 1781. Widely considered the greatest violin maker of the second half of the 18th century, the Italian artisan had a unique approach and is known for adding a luminous red varnish to his instruments—which are said to be among the best in the world. The global auction record for a Guadagnini violin is  US$2,106,933, sold in 2018.

#3

Schubert wrote the “Rosamunde” Quartet while suffering the symptoms of syphilis a few years before his death in 1828 at age 31. He was living with constant headaches, fever, and mercury poisoning; mercury was a common treatment at the time for the sexually transmitted infection. In March 1824 he wrote a letter to a friend that said in part: “I feel myself to be the most unfortunate, the most miserable being in the world. Think of a man whose health will never be right again, and who from despair over the fact makes it worse instead of better; think of a man, I say, whose splendid hopes have come to naught.”

Yet his music is “serenely beautiful at times, and at times dramatic, but never raging or ugly,” Blackman shares with Stir. “It is like he poured his best into his music and had nothing left.”

#4

Sometimes called the Dante Sonata, as it takes its name from Dante’s Divine Comedy, Liszt’s Après une lecture du Dante: Fantasia quasi Sonata is what Blackman describes as “diabolically difficult”. Ordronneau will perform the technically challenging single-movement sonata, which “explores the edges of human imagination”, Blackman notes, “daring us to ‘look’ with our ears into the bowels of hell.”

#5

Schumann wrote Piano Quintet in E-flat major, Op. 44 in 1842, and to this day it is considered one of greatest chamber works of all time.

“All the great quintets by later composers such as Dvořák and Brahms are modelled after his,” Blackman shares with Stir.  Schumann dedicated the work to his wife, Clara, a supremely talented pianist, who performed it at the world premiere the following year.

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