THERE’S not much of 2014 left, so it’s easy to predict that the special concert next Tuesday will be Larry Sitsky’s last 80th birthday concert.
Larry Sitsky and Tor Frømyhr, photo by Stuart Hay, ANU
Artist in Residence Tor Frømyhr will join Sitsky next Tuesday to perform Sitsky’s “Opus One” in concert for the first time in Australia, more than 50 years after it was first written.
The recital at the School of Music at the ANU will be the finale to a series of concerts to celebrate the 80th birthday of Emeritus Professor Sitsky.
The concert will feature Sitsky’s “Sonata for Unaccompanied Violin”, which both chronologically and affectionately is regarded as his Opus One, and his “Fantasia No 11, E,” alongside Ferruccio Busoni’s rarely performed “Sonata No.2 for Clavier & Violine”.
“Opus One” was written by Sitsky in 1958. Oddly, while it has been recorded and performed around the world, it has never been played at a concert in Australia.
“It was not my first composition, but the first in which I felt that some personal voice had emerged, and hence I grandly labelled it “Opus One. There was never an Opus Two,” Sitsky says.
“It had been heard and performed in the USA and England, and recorded in Australia, but never played in public. I thank Tor for reviving this baby piece after more than half a century.”
The recording of Sitsky’s “Opus One” featured the late Jan Sedivka, Frømyhr’s teacher at the University of Tasmania.
“The last time Larry and I worked together was to premiere his “Violin Concerto No.4, The Dreaming”, in 2006,” Frømyhr said. “The work was actually written by Larry for Jan but he was unable to perform at the premiere and so I was fortunate enough to play in his place.”
Frømyhr will be playing his Giulio Degani violin, built in 1899.
Sitsky’s first performance of the difficult Busoni sonata was with Ernest Llewellyn in the 1960s, not long after the School of Music first opened in 1965.
Sitsky’s “Opus One” concert, in the Larry Sitsky Recital Room, ANU School of Music, 6:30pm on Tuesday, December 9. Tickets at the door or bookings to http://music.anu.edu.au/events/opusone
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