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| Market Square Concerts, Part 1: October, November & January |
Labor Day has passed and with it, presumably, the end of Summer (though it really has felt like Autumn now and then). The kids were already back in school before September went into fast-forward and now it's October: Hallowe'en is in the air and Christmas stuff is already on the shelves...
And with that, the New Season is ready to begin: if you attend the Harrisburg Symphony's Masterworks Concerts, their first concert is this weekend, October 6th and 7th – and then the following Tuesday, October 9th, you can hear several members of the Harrisburg Symphony with the opening concert of Market Square Concerts 2018-2019 Season!
The program consists of something you might normally think of as “orchestral” – they're concertos, after all and there is the business with contrasts between soloists and orchestra, right? But even in Bach's eye, this was still chamber music: these pieces were written for a small group of performers, so we might use the term “chamber orchestra” but the truth of the matter is, they're closer (by our standards) to a “larger chamber music ensemble” than the usual string quartet.
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| A Baroque "orchestra" with audience interspersed |
And “these pieces” are the Brandenburg Concertos of Johann Sebastian Bach, six works each one different from the others not only in the instruments needed to play them but in their solution to the question “how to write a concerto?” Or, perhaps, “what can a concerto be?” – at least as far as the 1720s were concerned.
I'll be posting more about them shortly in a separate post, but the first concert of the season features performers who might be familiar to you as members of the Harrisburg Symphony – including Peter Sirotin, Artistic Director of Market Square Concerts but also the Concertmaster of the Harrisburg Symphony. He will be joined by eighteen of his colleagues though they don't all play in any one of the concertos, and then in different combinations.
And they will be joined by harpsichordist Arthur Haas, especially evident as one of the soloists in the 5th Concerto, often described as the “first keyboard concerto” even though the harpsichord is only one of three soloists in the work, along with violin and flute. Here is Mr Haas, who played the 5th Brandenburg Concerto with the HSO a few seasons ago, playing Bach's “Chromatic Fantasy & Fugue”:
Since this post is a sampler of the season, I'm just going to include one of them, here, the 2nd Concerto, which features flute, oboe, violin and trumpet as the solo group with an “orchestra” of strings and harpsichord. In this performance, Claudio Abbado conducts Orchestra Mozart with soloists Giuliano Carmignola (violin), Michala Petri (recorder), Lucas Machias Navarro (oboe), & Rheinhold Friedrich (trumpet) with an orchestra of 12 string players plus the harpsichordist playing continuo. Not that one needs that large a “band” or a conductor (in Bach's day, the concertmaster would have been the “leader” of the ensemble: conductors as such didn't come along till later).
(The complete performance ends at 11:20 – the encore begins at 13:40, ending at 16:15 and worth the view!)
The performance is Tuesday at 8pm, October 9th. Jeff Woodruff, Executive Director of the Harrisburg Symphony, will be giving the pre-concert talk for this program, beginning at 7:15.
Looking ahead to the rest of the season, the November 10th concert features a piano trio, 2/3s of which we've heard in years past: Michael Brown played a solo recital in January 2012 and then more recently, Brown and cellist Nicholas Canellakis included some Schumann, Janáček, and Rachmaninoff on their program with a piece by Michael Brown.
So now we add violinist Elena Urioste to form the logically named Brown-Urioste-Canellakis Trio: here, accompanied by Michael Brown, she plays Amy Beach's Romance for this BBC Interview:
Though they'll be playing trios by Ernest Chausson and Antonin Dvořák in addition to Michael Brown's “Reflections” (a work from 2016), here's a clip of them playing a Haydn trio – the one in E-flat Major a.k.a No.45 – live from San Diego:
For this sample, I've chosen the legendary Beaux Arts Trio's recording of the 2nd Movement, the scherzo, from Ernest Chausson's Piano Trio in G Minor:
This concert is at 8pm on Saturday, November 10th, at Market Square Church.
If your summer vacation seems like only yesterday, it's possible next year feels like it's so far away, but shortly after the new year begins – Wednesday, 8pm, January 9th, 2019, at Market Square Church – local audiences will be introduced to a young Spanish violinist, Francisco Fullana, and the pianist Jiayi Shi in a program of works by Enesco and Bartók (his 2nd Rhapsody) and sonatas by Beethoven and Debussy.
The Violin Channel's“Twenty Questions” video gives you some personal insights into the performer,
and this video of the Granados Violin Sonata was recorded just this past March, announcing the winner of an Avery Fisher Career Grant, with pianist Jiayi Shi.
If you need more to convince you, check out this live concert with Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Simon Bolivar Symphony in Caracas with the Violin Concerto of Johannes Brahms.
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| Market Square Concerts, Part 2: February, March and April |
In February, the Doric Quartet returns for a concert on Wednesday, February 20th at 8pm – this concert will be held at Temple Ohev Sholom – and a program with three very different quartets: Haydn's Op.33/4, Bartók's 5th, and Mendelssohn's Op.44/2.
In this conversation, filmed while recording a set of Haydn quartets, they discuss the challenges of using “classical bows” rather than the more heavily-weighted modern bow, and how it helps them realize a cleaner “classical” sound – classical in the sense of the time of Mozart and Haydn but also the music's clarity with its leaner textures (as opposed to those of a "romantic" style):
Here's the finale of Haydn's Op.20/6 in A (the Fugue with Three Subjects) recorded at London's gorgeous Wigmore Hall in 2013:
Not using “classical bows” in this one, here's their performance of the 4th movement scherzo from Bartók's 4th Quartet :
(Every time I hear this, I recall a former colleague describing this as “down-home music,” which may make you think you're in for something rustic or folksy, until I remembered he was a 2nd-generation Hungarian...)
I'll be giving the pre-concert talk for this one at 7:15 that night – meanwhile, you can catch up on their previous appearance here from 2016.
The latest “hot new young” quartets travel through Harrisburg every season, and we're one of only eight locations across the country who get to hear each of the winners of the legendary Cleveland Quartet Award as part of their prize's package tour. (The latest winner is the Rolston Quartet who'll be performing next month at Market Square Church.)
And each year, we hear these and wish them the best and wonder if they'll eventually become one of The Great Quartets we remember, performing around the world to great acclaim, winning awards with their latest recordings, becoming the standard the next generation of “hot new young quartets” will model themselves after.
2019 will mark 25 years since the Pacifica Quartet first got together, winning the Naumburg Award four years later and, in 2002, the Cleveland Quartet Award followed in 2006 by an Avery Fisher Career Grant. And so on...
Now, they return to Harrisburg with an all-Shostakovich program – the 1st, 3rd, and 7th Quartets – on Sunday, March 24th at 4pm at Market Square Church. At 3:15, Truman Bullard offers insights into this complex composer and these very personal works.
In this sample, the Pacifica plays an excerpt from Shostakovich's 7th Quartet, part of a “Tiny Desk Concert” that was originally broadcast live from NPR:
Cellist Brandon Vamos talks about the Shostakovich quartets:
Here is the 4th Movement of Shostakovich's first quartet with the Pacifica Quartet:
And so the season ends with an introduction to the latest Cleveland Quartet Award winner, the Rolston Quartet who'll perform Haydn's “Sunrise” Quartet, Ligeti's 1st Quartet, and Brahms' 2nd Quartet (and it's been a long time since we've heard a Brahms String Quartet at Market Square Concerts, for some reason!). It's the last of the subscription concerts on Wednesday April 24th, at 8pm at Market Square Church.
Giving you an idea of the quartet, here's their introduction to a performance in Montreal this past June:
followed by this earlier conversation, with a previous configuration:
Though they'll be playing Haydn's Op. 76/4, here's their performance of his Op.77/1 (1st Movement) from the 2016 BANF competition, one of the more prestigious chamber music competitions in the world:
Here they are playing the 1st Movement of Mendelssohn's Quartet Op.44/#1:
And then we can sit back, wait a few years to see if they become one of the more durable quartets so we get to say “Ah, yes, we heard them when...”
So check back to see (and listen to) more detailed posts about each concert as the season continues, with background information on the composers, their music, and the times they were written in, as well as a chance to hear samples of the music on the program.
As the season begins, help us celebrate live music-making. Hope to see you there!
Happy Listening!
- Dick Strawser
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