Fancy a spot of chamber music?
This is music written for small groups of players, where there is only one instrument per part. (A chamber orchestra, such as The Bathurst Chamber Orchestra is a much smaller orchestra than the Sydney Symphony, and may have only two instruments playing each line of music.)
A good place to start is with Schubert, one of the most amazing composers in music history. He composed an enormous amount of music in his short life of 31 years, including symphonies, operas, over six hundred songs, and quite a bit of chamber music.
Let's begin with his terrific song, The Trout, here sung by Ian Bostridge.
Schubert wrote an interesting set of variations on this tune in the fourth movement of his very popular Trout Quintet.
This piece of music was written for an unusual combination of
Piano
Violin
Viola
Cello
and
Double Bass.
(It is unusual because double basses do not usually feature in small string ensembles (though they are used in chamber orchestras).
The string quartet usually consists of two violins, a viola, and a cello as seen in this article and photo of Bella Forte, a group of four Mitchell Conservatorium students who play for weddings, parties, anything.
We'll finish this introduction to chamber music with the beautiful Nocturne movement from Borodin's Second String Quartet, performed by the distinguished Jerusalem Quartet.
