'Tis the season for summer concerts and while I’ll post separately about the two Brahms sextets on this summer’s series, I wanted to include these two videos from another summer festival, recorded at the La Jolla SummerFest, performances of works you can hear with Market Square Concerts' Summermusic 2011.
The first video is a performance of the Dvořák Piano Quintet which is on our first program as Stuart Malina, conductor of the Harrisburg Symphony, joins the Fry Street String Quartet for the concert Friday night at 8pm in Market Square Church.
The Dvořák Quintet may be one of the more popular of the basic piano quintets out there – and follows a direct line from Johannes Brahms’ F Minor Quintet which was directly inspired by Robert Schumann’s E-flat Major Quintet.
This performance, recorded in 2006, features violinists Lindsay Deutsch and Bei Zhu, violist Paul Neubauer, cellist Gary Hoffman, and pianist Weiyin Chen.
(Incidentally, Gary Hoffman will be performing with Market Square Concerts during the May 2012 concert, joining the Cypress String Quartet for another famous quintet, the String Quintet in C Major by Franz Schubert. But more of that, later.)
Friday’s first concert of this season’s Summermusic will also include Haydn’s Quartet Op. 17 No. 6 and Béla Bartók’s String Quartet No. 3 (you can read about Bartók here and listen to video clips of the quartet in this post) along with the Duet for Oboe and Viola by American composer, Alvin Ettler.
Hey, the music will be hot but the place is air-conditioned!
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While there’s lots of talk these days about Washington’s “Gang of Six,” Cho-Liang Lin’s introduction to this video from the La Jolla 2007 summer festival of Brahms’ Sextet in G Major, may help us understand why politicians would never be able to play chamber music, as he gives you an insider’s insight into the give-and-take of making music together.
In this performance, Cho-Liang Lin is joined by violinist Sheryl Staples, violists James Dunham and Che-Yen Chen, and cellists Ralph Kirshbaum and Alisa Weilerstein.
The Fry Street String Quartet will be joined by Market Square Concerts’ artistic director Peter Sirotin playing the viola and his colleague from the Mendelssohn Piano Trio, cellist Fiona Thompson, who’s also the principal cellist of the Harrisburg Symphony.
This concert - which also includes Halvorsen's arrangement for violin and viola of a Passacaglia by Handel, Josef Rheinberger's Quartet for Piano, Oboe, Viola and Cello, and Joan Tower's "Island Prelude" for oboe and strings - takes place next Tuesday (the 26th) at the earlier-than-usual time of 6:00pm at Market Square Church.
More on the background of Brahms’ Sextets in a bit…
Meanwhile, hope you’re staying cool!
- Dick Strawser
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