Fall 2024: Songs Around The Piano

“Songs Around The Piano” presents charming works by Johannes Brahms, Gioachino Rossini, and Aaron Copland. For this concert, we were accompanied by the lovely and talented pianist Sarah Ehle.

We began with selections from "Old American Songs," settings arranged by the American composer Aaron Copland in 1950 and 1952, based on scores he discovered in the John Hay Library at Brown University. Originally scored for voice and piano, they were reworked for baritone (or mezzo-soprano) and orchestra, and later arranged for chorus by Irving Fine, David L. Brunner, Glenn Koponen, Gregory Rose and Raymond Wilding-White.

We continued with Johannes Brahm's delicious Drei Quartette, Op 64. As Calum MacDonald wrote for Hyperion, "Brahms published the set of Drei Quartette, Op 64 in 1874, though the first of them, An die Heimat, probably dates from about 1862. This song is very elaborately laid out: Brahms draws a remarkable, motet-like range of colour from the four voices in harmony, treating them like a tiny chorus with canonic imitations, occasional solos and little a cappella passages; while to Sternau’s text, a conventional praise of the poet’s (unspecified) homeland, he brings a depth of feeling entirely understandable if—as seems likely—the piece was composed during Brahms’s first winter in Vienna, far away from Hamburg. There follows a setting of Friedrich Schiller’s Der Abend, a late poem full of Classical metaphor which Brahms ingeniously touches into life with a male/female dialogue for Apollo and Thetis and a haunting piano accompaniment mimicking the step of the sun-god’s horses; there is a moment of pure magic as the horses stop (the piano falls silent) and drink cooling draughts from the sea in long female-voice phrases. Op 64 concludes with a translation of a Turkish folk-poem made by G F Daumer, the poet of the Liebeslieder-Walzer, whose copious output of both original verse and translations from many languages Brahms often recurred to when choosing texts for setting. Fragen is a set of questions put to a lover (the tenor) by the other three parts, massed as a vocal trio. It develops into a tightly dovetailed dialogue, carried out with a sensitive mingling of humour and pathos."

Finally, we concluded with Gioachino Rossini's "Tre quartetti da camera," a set of three songs composed in 1827. Rossini, then thirty five, was living in Paris and homesick for Italy. He composed these as he grappled with the recent death of his beloved mother, and was seriously considering retiring from a career as an opera composer that had brought him international fame. Not part of any opera, these surprisingly cheerful and charming pieces express Rossini's love of Venice.

Spring 2023: An Old House in Vienna

Marianne von Martines lived in an exceptionally rich musical environment. In a single house in the center of Vienna in the 1750s, Martines and her family shared quarters with Joseph Haydn, who gave Martines harpsichord lessons; with the Italian poet Metastasio, the most famous opera librettist of the day, who decided to oversee her musical education; and with Nicola Porpora, a legendary voice teacher and composer, who schooled her in singing.The major work on the program is the Pioneer Valley premiere of Martines’s Dixit Dominus. In 1773, she was the first woman admitted to the Philharmonic Academy in Bologna and composed her Dixit Dominus to commemorate that occasion. It is a sparkling multi-movement work, featuring four vocal soloists, 5-part chorus, and a chamber orchestra.

Haydn composed three distinct versions of his Seven Last Words of Christ – first for full orchestra, then for string quartet, and finally for chorus and orchestra. This performance marries the choral version with string quartet accompaniment. Metastasio’s texts were set to music more than 800 times by dozens of leading composers. Included in this concert are settings of his texts by Gluck, Mozart and Caldara, along with Porpora’s own Kyrie.