A CLASSIC MEETS HIS IMMORTAL BELOVED

Ah, those summer nights in Eastern Europe, 1812.

A week after Napoleon invades Russia, Ludwig van Beethoven almost certainly says “Yes, tonight Josephine” to the love of his life, the unhappily married and recently jilted but socially impossible match, Countess Jozefina Brunszvik. Three days later he pours forth – with the pencil (!) he souvenired from the tryst – the 10 little pages of hopeless devotion that have spawned thousands of pages of academic speculation. He hastily concludes in order to make the next post, then scrunches them in his pocket for the rest of his life.

This superb program revolves around the tantalizing enigma of the “Immortal Beloved” letters. Young Sydney composer Ella Macens, whose tender and expressive work with the Goldner and Flinders quartets has demonstrated a special affinity with chamber strings, embraces baroque tuning with a new commission inspired by Ludwig’s passionate declarations.

Exactly nine months after the clandestine Spa-town rendezvous, the countess bore a daughter that she christened Minona (hint: spell it backwards). No paternity mystery shrouds the other fruit of the encounter though, Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony, whose gestation period was considerably shorter. This utterly delightful homage to Haydn, so full of wit and musical slapstick, is light-years from the mindset of the letters, even though he started composing it then and there in the same hotel room.

Is that why he didn’t make it to the post office? Heard in the Ensemble’s by now familiar “unplugged” style, it’s guaranteed to banish frustration and consternation to your back pockets too.

Also on the bill, the remarkable rip-off that is the Fifth Symphony in D minor by Beethoven’s friend, pupil and long-suffering PA, Ferdinand Ries (written after his narrow escape from Bonaparte-ravished Russia, when fate led him to knock on the door of the London Philharmonic), and one of the first string sextets ever written, Boccherini’s Op. 24, No.4 in F minor. A sumptuous masterpiece that deserves classic status.