The Australian String Quartet joins forces with esteemed British clarinettist and conductor Michael Collins MBE for an exploration of alchemical mysteries. Elizabethan England was transfixed by the idea that base metals could be transformed into gold, when exposed to the correct processes. Celebrated British composer Thomas Adès took on this Tudor obsession: his Alchymia for clarinet and string quartet moulds four movements from raw musical and literary material – Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a song by William Byrd, a Dowland lute lamentation and a startling London street-scene cameo from Alban Berg’s opera Lulu.

As a programmed interlude during this melding of instrumental metals, the first half ends with Erich Korngold’s String Quartet No. 2. Written in 1933, just before Korngold departed Vienna for Hollywood (where he would go on to score sixteen films and be nominated for two Oscars), the second quartet is a work on the brink of change, a quartet with its feet in a world of Viennese late-romanticism, yet with glimmers of the sensuous Hollywood glow that was to come.

In the second half of the program, we return to the particular metallurgy of the opening: Michael Collins rejoins the ASQ to star in Mozart’s beloved Clarinet Quintet. The Quintet, written for clarinettist Anton Stadler, melds brilliance with intimacy in four movements of lyricism and contrast. Indeed, Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet showcases the ultimate musical alchemy: as a contemporary marvelled of Stadler, ‘Never should I have thought that a clarinet could be capable of imitating a human voice so deceptively.’