At the opening night of Richard Strauss’ Salome at the Stadtheatre in Graz in 1906, an extraordinary dinner party took place. The world and its music was changing, and the participants of the dinner party – Puccini, Schoenberg, Zemlinsky, Berg, Mahler, Webern, and Strauss – were at the forefront of music at this volatile time.

In this brilliant performance Ensemble Q re-creates that dinner party and highlights the sometimes astonishing disparity of works written around that time. It was the meeting between deep romanticism and atonality, between deep set tradition and breaking of boundaries to allow freedom of artistic expression.

The program features the stark beauty of solo and duo works by Anton Webern, Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg alongside the rich romanticism of Richard Strauss’ fertile and pictorially imaginative Piano Quartet, Giacomo Puccini’s exquisite string quartet Crisantemi and Gustav Mahler’s Song of the Wayfarer, arranged for chamber ensemble by his dinner party comrade Arnold Schoenberg and performed at The Dinner Party by guest artist, Opera Queensland baritone Shaun Brown.

The delectable desserts feature Alexander von Zemlinsky’s Humoreske for wind quintet, and Till Eulenspiegel Einmal Anders! by Strauss/Hasenöhrl.