The 2011 David Pereira Cello Series begins with a beautiful selection of works for piano and strings: the Strauss String Sextet from the opera Capriccio;  Brahms G minor Piano Quartet; and Schoenberg Transfigured Night.

Featuring some of Australia's finest performers: David Pereira, cello; Timothy Young, piano; Imants Larsens, viola; Natsuko Yoshimoto, violin, together for the first time as the Primarosa Players.  

Transfigured Night (1896)

Two figures pass through the bare, cold grove;
the moon accompanies them, they gaze into it.
The moon races above some tall oaks;
No trace of a cloud filters the sky’s light,
into which the dark treetops stretch.

A female voice speaks:
I am carrying a child, and not yours;
I walk in sin beside you.
I have deeply sinned against myself.

I no longer believed in happiness
And yet was full of longing
For a life with meaning, for the joy
And duty of maternity; so I dared
And, quaking, let my sex
Be taken by a stranger,
And was blessed by it.

Now life has taken its revenge,
For now I have met you, yes you.
She takes an awkward step.
She looks up: the moon races alongside her.
Her dark glance is saturated with light.

A male voice speaks:
Let the child you have conceived
Be no trouble to your soul.
How brilliantly the universe shines!

It casts a luminosity on everything;
you float with me upon a cold sea,
but a peculiar warmth glimmers
from you to me, and then from me to you.

Thus is transfigured the child of another man;
You will bear it for me, as my own;
You have brought your luminosity to me,
You have made me a child myself.

He clasps her round her strong hips.
Their kisses mingle breath in the night air.
Two humans pass through the high, clear night.

–Richard Dehmel, Verklärte Nacht first published in Weib und Welt (1896)(S.H. transl.)