We are offering icons of personal expression, masterworks that could not be contained within the walls of the few but needed to be shared with many. Because ‘the best things cannot be told,’ and musical discourse begins where words fail, our intimate music making is necessary now more than ever.
Our season contains works that model the bravery of telling truth to power, affirm equality of all persons, and look beyond the darkest present; they allow us to sing, dance and dare to open ourselves to others. We will present major works by Haydn, who invented our medium; Beethoven, who dared to publicly show his anger at convention; Farrenc, whose virtuosity defied gender stereotype; Dvořák, the Czech outsider whose music won acceptance in Germanic circles, who visited America and extolled the richness of Native and African American musical practices; Coleridge-Taylor, the son of a Creole father and an English mother, who was inspired by Brahms; Messiaen, whose transcendent vision of the end times during WW2 still informs; and Strauss, whose beautiful string sextet introduces his final opera Capriccio in which the debate about the primacy of words or music is left unresolved by the plot of words set to exquisite music!
Dialogues in duos for clarinet and piano by Debussy, violin and viola by Mozart, and violin and bass by Penderecki are balanced by larger interactions with quartets by Chausson, Webern, and Korngold; Mendelssohn’s First String Quintet; Brahms’s First String Sextet; and in our season finale, our 2025 BCMS commission of a string octet by Alyssa Wang, one of our member violinists. Our season will also conclude with Robert Schumann’s beloved Piano Quintet which was publicly premiered by Clara Schumann at the piano at the Leipzig Gewandhaus beyond the seemingly exclusive private salon with which great chamber music had been associated.
We welcome you to join us. Come, bring your friends, and be inspired!
Marcus A. Thompson, Artistic Director
