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 insightful performances of the finest chamber music by many of today’s most exciting players, continues with a balance of the familiar and the new in every concert, masterworks of every period placed to honor creators and creation.
Our anniversary honorees this year include Charles Martin Loeffler, Sofia Gubaidulina, Ingolf Dahl, and Anton Arensky. The April performance of Janáček’s Violin and Piano Sonata coincides with the anniversary of its premiere in April 1912! Sofia Gubaidulina, one of the world’s leading composers, turns eighty during the week we play her early piano quintet to kick of the series of piano quintets to follow on every concert. Her close connection to Shostakovich during the years it was composed make the introduction of her piano quintet to Boston audiences compelling and necessary!
Our November concert contains a rare gem. To those who love rich string quartet textures the Bloch Two Pieces will be a revelation even as they resonate the same C major tonalities heard earlier in the Haydn and Dohnányi trios. Building from three players, to four, and then five, the program concludes with the first really important work for piano and string quartet, the ever-popular Schumann Piano Quintet.
In December we move from Harvard’s Sanders Theater to MIT’s Kresge Auditorium in time to acknowledge the passing of Hanukah with Beethoven’s Variations for cello and piano on a theme from Handel’s oratorio, Judas Maccabeus. In that program we also play the piano quintet arrangement of Arnold Schoenberg’s early Chamber Symphony, the first of the many such works by Jewish composers who were or would be exiled from Europe by World War Two to a life in Los Angeles of unprecedented creativity in music for film, concert hall, and in teaching the public about music.
The story of how great artists uprooted from their native soil make a new life and world for themselves and others is better known through painting, literature, dance, film and symphonic music than it is in chamber music. The range of the contributions by consummate masters of chamber music such as Korngold, Eisler, Toch, Castelnuovo-Tedesco will be the subject of our third annual Winter Festival and Forum at MIT’s Kresge in January flanked by the works of two other exiles, Schoenberg and Dahl, on the December and February programs.
The extraordinary personal achievements of our recent and future visitors and guests will also add to the excitement this year. Among them are the new principal violist of the San Francisco Symphony, the new principal flutist of the Pittsburgh Symphony, the former principal cellist of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the new concertmaster of the Toronto Symphony and the winner of the Gold Medal in cello at the 2011 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow! We are grateful as well for visits from friends who are leaders and members of other local ensembles including the Boston Symphony, Boston Musica Viva, and Marlboro Music.
All of this has been made possible by your continued generous support and from the wise guidance and dedication of our Board. We remain continually grateful and look forward to beautiful music making this year.
Musically speaking,
Marcus A. Thompson
