Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet (1790) is the kind of work that can evoke memories of where you were the first time you encountered it. It is one of his latest pieces–from the period when, as one […]

With apologies to Shakespeare and to Schubert (‘Who is Sylvia…?’) we dare ask up front a question that is probably on many minds. Zdeněk Fibich was born in 1850 (Vseborice, Bohemia)–of a Czech father and […]

Each January since 2010 we have had the privilege of exploring topics in forum and concert that expand the contexts in which we appreciate the great chamber music literature. With support from MIT Music and […]

Our December concert is comprised of familiar pieces built on memorable themes and many curious and wonderful connections. Two of our composers, Bach and Handel, were revered by everybody’s ‘composer of the month,’ Ludwig van […]

The second program of our 29th season reminds me of many different beginnings in my own life: Haydn, as the “father of chamber music”, the Dohnányi Serenade as one I first performed on many tours […]

Our first program of the twenty-ninth BCMS season is full of unusual juxtapositions of youth and age. Mozart’s Piano Trio in B-flat major, written in 1786, is the mature work of a young composer whose […]

Dear Friends: It is hard to contain the excitement we feel about the music we’ll hear, the artists we’ll experience and the ideas we’ll explore throughout the rest of the season. Our mission, to present […]

Our April concert can probably be distinguished by its containment of ‘all manner of plucked things;’ that is, the use of the plucked sound, explicitly and implicitly, as a source of the character and variety […]

Our March concert provides a rare opportunity to invoke the Spiritus Hungaricus–that pungent ethnic spice that enlivened and informed so much of the formal classical music from Haydn to Brahms by occasionally allowing the rowdies […]

In 1822 Schubert set Rückert’s five-verse poem, Sei mir gegrüßt (I greet you), to music, and it became one of the most exquisite of his love songs. Five years later, it found its way to the […]