Lennox quartet to perform at Annual Porchetta Day

A string quartet of country girls who studied at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music will perform Italian classics among the trees at Annual Porchetta Day, part of Festival Italiano in Gunnedah on Saturday, September 25.

Among the well known traditional songs will be The Tarantella (Italian Wedding Song) and O Sole Mio, masterpieces such as La Donna E Mobile from Rigoletto and works from Vivaldi and Corelli. But, responding to the audience, the quartet is just as likely to launch into adaptations of modern songs – whatever they feel fits the mood of Gunnedah’s food and wine festival.

The performance of the Lennox Quartet, comprising some of Sydney’s finest young string players, has been sponsored by the Mornington Heights property development and is certain to be one of the highlights of Annual Porchetta Day.

The Quartet formed in 2006 with the aim of providing entertainment at events and also for performing concerts both in Sydney and in regional NSW.

Although all the members of the group studied at the Sydney Conservatorium, Ezmi Pepper and Freya Franzen are from Canberra, Jenny Compton from Orange and Julia Starkey

from Tamworth. The country connection has been a key factor in the quartet performing concerts outside of Sydney.

The Quartet specialises in all genres of music from Baroque through to romantic classical, as well as some jazz, popular and tango, but on Annual Porchetta Day there will definitely be an Italian flavour and it is certain to create a fitting atmosphere for the food and wine festival.

This year the the Quartet performed the Brahms Clarinet Quintet with associate artist Toby Armstrong at the All Saints Anglican

Church in Nundle, and also at Calala Cottage in Tamworth hosted by the Tamworth Historical Society. In June they performed a program of Dvorak, Telemann and Kodaly at Taylor Galleries in Summer Hill and later that month performed Haydn’s Little Organ Mass and six sacred motets by Mozart with the Penrith City Choir. The ensemble will tour to Mudgee in October and is in the process of planning a trip to the Czech Republic to attend a chamber music summer school in Pilsen in 2010.