We are launching our 08-09 season Wednesday, October 22 at Buff Sem! We have a great program planned and should make for a great evening of chamber music. One of the pieces in the program, Roland Martin’s A Rose Beside the Water, was premiered last night at UB’s Slee Hall. It’s a great song cycle, done in collaboration with painter Catherine Parker. Catherine’s paintings for this piece are exquisite! The concert went very well, but unfortunately one of the singers was very ill so it was not a complete performance of the work. You can read a review of that concert over at the Buffalo News. So come hear the work in its entirety at our concert! We will also be doing two other Martin songs, with mezzo soprano Denise Blackmore, with text by Ursula Vaughan Williams.
The rest of the program has a little bit for everyone. Mozart’s transcriptions for string trio (K. 404a) of Bach’s keyboard music are of great historical importance as they represent Mozart’s first acquaintance with the fugal writing of Bach. We will be performing three of the six Preludes and Fugues that Mozart transcribed. And in two of them, the Prelude is not a transcription but an original composition by Mozart preceding the fugue by Bach.
Cellist David Schmude will play Messiaen’s Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus for cello and piano. The piece is the fifth movement of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, written in 1940 while the composer was in a German prison camp. If you know David’s playing, you know this will be quite a moving performance! Also, a small piece of trivia, 2008 marks the 100th anniversary of Messiaen’s birth, so we definitely wanted to program a work by this 20th century master.
And finally, Dvořák String Quintet in G Major, op. 77. It is scored for 2 violins, viola, cello and bass. I love playing chamber music with bass! Most quintets of the time either doubled the violas or the cellos, but by instead adding a bass Dvorak adds a new dimension and depth to the sound of the typical string quintet.
So that’s our first concert and we hope to see you there. And if you haven’t yet, be sure to join our email mailing list!