Program:

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Clarinet Quintet (1906)
Johannes Brahms, Clarinet Quintet (1891)

Artists:

Sangwon Lee, clarinet
Grant Houston and Yoonhee Lee, violins,
Anna Griffis, viola
Joseph Gotoff, cello

Concert at 6:30/doors at 6pm

About the Program:

Tonight's program pairs two masterworks of the clarinet quintet repertoire: Brahms's autumnal Op. 115, composed in 1891 after a long retreat from public composition and inspired by clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld, and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's Op. 10, written just four years later by a young composer steeped in late-Victorian elegance but possessed of a uniquely warm, folk-inflected lyricism. Where Brahms distills German Romanticism to its reflective essence — hushed yearning themes, tender slow movements, and a quietly resolved finale — Coleridge-Taylor answers with ardent, songlike writing that is formally assured yet emotionally generous, blossoming from poised opening themes to a hopeful, affirmative close. Though separated by nationality and experience, both composers treat the clarinet as a human narrator in intimate dialogue with the string quartet, and together these two quintets chart a shared chamber ideal: music that speaks close and true.

Program:

Nino Rota, Trio for Clarinet, Cello and Piano (1973)
Nicola LeFanu, Nocturne for cello and piano, and Lullaby for clarinet and piano (1988)

Artists:

Sangwon Lee, clarinet
Grant Houston and Yoonhee Lee, violins,
Anna Griffis, viola
Joseph Gotoff, cello

Concert at 6:30/doors 6pm

About the Program:

Tonight's program traces a historical arc through three transformations of the clarinet trio: from Bruch's twilight Romanticism to Khachaturian's exotic modernism to LeFanu's contemporary lyricism.

Max Bruch composed his Eight Pieces, Op. 83, in 1909 in his seventies for his son, a clarinetist, offering the aging Romantic a final moment of lyrical reflection. These pieces favor rich, mellow instrumental hues and autumnal maturity of expression, with melancholy opening themes that resolve into quiet nobility—a farewell to a musical language Bruch had perfected across a lifetime. Aram Khachaturian's Trio, composed in 1932 while still a student at the Moscow Conservatory, answers with a younger voice steeped in a different inheritance: a blend of classical form with exotic folk elements that speaks of Eastern Eurasian traditions. Where Bruch distills, Khachaturian ornaments—his rhapsodic first movement unfolds through gypsy-like improvisations, and his finale spirals through variations on Uzbek folk melody.

Nearly sixty years on, Nicola LeFanu's Lullaby for clarinet and piano and Nocturne for cello and piano (1988) return to intimacy and restraint. Written in an era that has absorbed both her predecessors, these miniatures speak quietly but assuredly: music that honors the clarinet and cello as human voices in conversation, yet in a contemporary idiom stripped to essentials. Together, these three works chart a shared chamber ideal—the belief that truth lives in melody, color, and close musical dialogue.

Program:

J. S. Bach, Goldberg Variations (1741), arr. for String Trio by Dimitry Sitkovetsky

Artists:

About the Program:

Johann Sebastian Bach / Dmitry SitkovetskyGoldberg Variations, BWV 988 (arr. for string trio, 1984)

Bach's Goldberg Variations hold a peculiar place in the repertoire: endlessly analyzed, yet somehow endlessly mysterious. Written in 1741 for two-manual harpsichord, the work unfolds as an Aria followed by thirty variations — canons, dances, character pieces, a boisterous quodlibet — before the Aria returns at the end, the same notes now carrying the weight of everything that has come between.

Dmitry Sitkovetsky made his string trio arrangement in 1984, dedicating it to the memory of Glenn Gould, whose two landmark recordings (1955 and 1981) had done so much to place the Goldbergs at the center of musical life. The dedication is fitting: like Gould, Sitkovetsky is less interested in replication than in reimagining. Distributing Bach's voices across violin, viola, and cello transforms the music in subtle but profound ways. What was crystalline and percussive on the harpsichord becomes warm, breathing, sustained. The counterpoint — always present in the original — becomes something you can almost see, each voice now embodied by a different instrument, different timbre, different physical presence on the stage.

The result is not Bach updated or Bach reimagined so much as Bach heard differently — as if a familiar room has been entered through a new door.

Program:

Ralph Vaughan Williams, Phantasy Quintet (1912)
Antonin Dvorak, Quintet for Strings in E flat Major, Op. 97 (1893)

Artists:

Grant Houston and Yoonhee Lee, violins,
Anna Griffis, and Ken Hamao, violas
Joseph Gotoff, cello

Concert at 6:30/doors 6pm

About the Program:

Antonín Dvořák's String Quintet in E-flat major, Op. 97, was composed during the summer of 1893 in Spillville, Iowa, a moment of reunion and longing crystallized into chamber music. The work opens with a solo viola—Dvořák's own instrument—introducing a pentatonic melody, and that single voice becomes the seed from which everything grows. The scherzo opens with rhythmic figures that evoke Native American drum patterns, which Dvořák encountered in Spillville, while its middle section brings a "broad, leisurely melody heard first in the viola...one of Dvořák's most enchanting themes"—a melody some hear as rooted in the memory of American prairie. The quintet asks: what does it mean to be displaced, to listen, to transform what you hear into something that belongs to you?

Ralph Vaughan Williams posed a related question across the Atlantic. His Phantasy Quintet, composed in 1912, introduces "an arching pentatonic solo" in the viola—a melody drawn from English folk song, and the four movements are "played attacca," sharing this thematic idea throughout. The viola's "rich but haunting sound appealed to the composer (he played the instrument himself)", and in the Scherzo, music sweeps along "in 7/4 time over a bubbling Holstian ostinato...marked by a rhythmic freedom associated with English madrigals". Both composers let the viola speak first. Both listen to tradition—to folk memory, to what voices before them have sung—and ask what a single melody can become when treated with imagination and reverence.