music

chamber music

January 17, 2010
Sunday @ 3:00 p.m.

Tickets
$15 for adults, and $10 for seniors, students, youth, military, and teachers

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BPA's January Chamber Music program features three masterpieces written decades apart, in unrelated places. All the more fascinating and instructive are the obvious and subtle ways in which such different styles correspond and speak to each other—the vocabulary of early-Romantic Vienna anticipating the fluidity of Late Romanticism, and the radicalism of mid-20th-century New York referencing the formal standards of the 18th century.

Violinist Thomas Monk, cellist Barbara Deppe, and pianist James Quitslund perform Franz Schubert’s Trio in B-flat for Violin, Violoncello & Piano, which was written in Vienna around 1826 and not performed until long after the composer’s early death. It is a piece of symphonic length and difficulty, exploiting all of the potential for thematic development and transformation that Schubert inherited from Mozart and Beethoven while lending his own characteristic “voice” to each detail.

Enrique Granados, the most famous musical representative of Catalan culture, presented his suite for piano, Goyescas, in 1911. The six pieces are inspired by paintings of Goya. “El coloquio” has as its subject a conversation that a young gentleman, seen from behind, is conducting through the wrought-iron grate of an elegant residence with an almost invisible young lady. This work features pianist Mary Foster Grant and “the great composer and critic Virgil Thompson.”

Arthur Berger, who was born in New York in 1912 and died just six years ago, was a leading figure in American Modernism. His Quartet for Winds, called by the great Virgil Thompson “one of the most satisfactory pieces…in the whole modern repertory,” echoes the same classical forms that Schubert transformed while conveying the spirit of its time (1941). The quartet features Sarah Felstiner (flute), Amy Duerr-Day (oboe), Patti Beasley (clarinet), and Nancy Bondurant (bassoon).