Concert at 6:30/doors 6pm

Program:

Samuel-Coleridge Taylor, Clarinet Quintet (1906)

Brahms Clarinet Quintet (1891)

Artists:

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

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.

Concert at 6:30/doors 6pm

Program:

Nino Rota, Trio for Clarinet, Cello and Piano (1973)

Nicola LeFanu, Nocturne for cello and piano and Lullaby for clarinet and piano (1988)

Max Bruch, Pieces for Clarinet, Cello and Piano, Op. 83

Artists:

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.

Concert at 6:30/doors 6pm

Program:

J. S. Bach, Goldberg Variations (1741), arr. 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.

Concert at 6:30/doors 6pm

Program:

Richard Strauss, String Sextet from Capriccio, Op. 85 (1939)

Shulamit Ran, Lyre of Orpheus (2008)

Arnold Schoenberg, Verklarte Nacht (1899)

Artists:

Grant Houston and Yoonhee Lee, violins,
Anna Griffis, and Ken Hamao, violas
Francesca McNeeley and Joseph Gotoff, celli

About the Program:

Arnold Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht ("Transfigured Night," 1899) is one of the great emotional experiences in chamber music. Written for string sextet, it follows the arc of a late-Romantic poem: two lovers walking in moonlight, a painful secret revealed, and — through the sheer force of feeling — a transformation. The music doesn't just describe the story. It is the transfiguration.

Richard Strauss was asking a related question forty years later when he composed his final opera, Capriccio — a work entirely consumed by the debate over whether words or music matter more. The string sextet that opens the opera, played onstage before a singer has uttered a syllable, is Strauss's quiet, gorgeous answer. Both pieces share not just a philosophy but an instrument: the rare and intimate sound of six strings playing as one.

Shulamit Ran's Lyre of Orpheus (2008) brings the question into our own time, invoking the oldest musician in Western mythology — the poet whose playing could stop rivers and soften stone. What does it mean to inherit that tradition? What does music still have the power to do?