Brahms - Piano Quartet in A Major, Op 26

Amandine Savary - piano
Corey Cerovsek - violin
Simon Oswell - viola
Thomas Carroll - cello

Another first outing at the Festival - will these innovations never cease? - for the Brahms A Major Piano Quartet. The least programmed of the three simply because of its length – the best part of an hour – it is at least as great as the better known C minor and G minor quartets. Another invitation to come along and see if you agree.

What are we, and everything around us, made of?  How are we held together without breaking apart? Science has made tremendous progress in the last one hundred years or so in establishing a convincing picture of nature, its most basic elements and how they interact with each other. The understanding we have developed is very effective and can describe essentially all man-made experiments and studies, including those that probe the deepest questions such as "what gives mass to everything". The answer is inextricably connected to what the vacuum really is. The latter question is now being addressed by the gigantic experiments of particle physics at the CERN Large Hadron  Collider. In this talk I will describe how these experiments study matter and the forces that act on matter, and then turn to the question of whether space in the absence of matter is empty -- or not.

Paris’ webpage

Bacteria are so small that 350 would fit in a line across the full-stop at the end of this sentence. Despite their size, many bacteria carry out beneficial or co-operative social interactions, with only a few being pathogenic murderers! Without bacteria, in the broadest sense, there would be no life on earth. My work concerns predatory bacteria; these invade and kill pathogens naturally, like living antibiotics. Studying their bacterial lives teaches humans how to combat drug-resistant infections. It also displays the beauty and complexity of the microscale architectures, and behaviours of a hidden world of tiny cells, that support us humans.

Liz’s web site