On Thursday 9 March at 20h00 in the Endler Hall, the Stellenbosch University Camerata under the baton of Leon Bosch perform Mozart’s Piano Concerto K414 and Richard Strauss’ Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings.

The Camerata is a vibrant young chamber orchestra made up of staff and students from the Stellenbosch University’s Music Department, with Suzanne Martens as concert master. The Camerata has just released a CD on Sony Classical, and boasts performances with Tim Kliphuis and with other international soloists such as Joshua Bell and Pinchas Zukermman. For this concert the Camerata will be conducted by Leon Bosch, who is well known to SA audiences as a virtuoso double bass player, but whose recent activities as conductor have taken him from the U.K. to Russia.

The award winning young South African pianist now living in the U.S.A., Megan-Geoffrey Prins will perform Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 12 in A major, KV 414. In a letter to his father Leopold, Mozart described the three concertos of 1782 as “… somewhere between too light and too difficult … music for both connoisseur and amateur…; even the less-learned will like it, without knowing why …”. The most distinctive of the three is KV 414, with its easy succession of melodies and its unassuming bravura.

Strauss’ Metamorphosen, one of his most memorable chamber works, was completed at the beginning of 1945. The work conveys at once the composer’s mourning the destruction around him, and a nostalgic view of aging and change.The Metamorphosen is seldom heard locally, and this performance presents a rare opportunity to hear this masterpiece in this guise which is both full of lament and pathos as well as heart wrenchingly beautiful.