Our Game of Themes programme combines ideas from Improvisation Theatre and musical competitions from the past. A rather well-documented competition is the one between Mozart and Clementi. The emperor of the Habsburg empire invited both musicians and they both documented the encounter! Grétry's Marche from his "Mariages Samnites" was used as a theme for the musicians to show their skill of improvising variations.
We are not trying to reenact the meeting. Rather, the audience was asked to define the character of the different variations. This tries to ensure two things:
1) Like Mozart and Clementi we only know moments before improvising what we have to do
2) Like their audience, our audience will have a stake in the event (finding out if we manage to use their suggestions) and by deciding on the characters have written the programme notes, as it were, or in other words, have some insider knowledge, as audiences in the past would have had knowing the famous themes inside-out.
The Scroll Ensemble
James Hewitt - Baroque Violin
Robert de Bree - Classical Oboe
Elizabeth Fadel - Cavaquinho
Bert Mooiman - Piano
Description of the improvisation duel which ended in a draw:
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More Game of Themes:
• Game of Themes
More Variations:
• Improvised Variations
Online Baroque Improvisation Ornamentation Course - learn to improvise baroque ornaments inspired by Quantz's fascinating pedagogy:
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