Sunday, January 26, 2014 at 4:00 pm

Program

Hamelin: Barcarolle
Medtner: Sonata in E minor “Night Wind” op. 25, no. 2
Schubert: Four Impromptus, op. 142

Marc-André Hamelin is renowned for his fresh readings of the established repertoire and for his exploration of lesser known works of the 19th and 20th centuries. He is admired for his brilliant technique and for his deep-thinking approach to everything he plays. In recent seasons he has appeared as recitalist or as soloist with orchestras in such cities as New York, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, Portland, Quebec, Antwerp, Berlin, London, Melbourne, Rotterdam, and Milan among others. A prolific recording artist, Mr. Hamelin expects to record approximately 50 CDs for the Hyperion label performing neglected masterpieces by Alkan, Ives, Medtner and Roslavets as well as the music of Haydn, Mozart, Schumann, Brahms, and Chopin. In 2010 Mr. Hamelin joined the ranks on CD of noted composer-pianists by releasing his own 12 Etudes in all the minor keys on the Hyperion label with publication by Edition Peters.

Winner of the 1985 Carnegie Hall Competition, Marc-André Hamelin was born in Montreal. He began to play the piano at the age of five and by the age of nine had already won top prize in the Canadian Music Competition. His father, a pharmacist by trade who was also an excellent pianist, had introduced Marc-André to the works of Alkan, Medtner and Sorabji when he was still very young. Mr. Hamelin is featured in the book The Composer-Pianists: Hamelin and the Eight by Robert Rimm, published by Amadeus Press.

Sunday, March 9, 2014 at 4:00 pm

Program

Wolf: Italian Serenade
Mozart: Quintet for clarinet & strings, K. 581
Brahms: Quintet for clarinet & strings, op. 115

One of only two wind players to have been awarded the Avery Fisher Prize since the award was established in 1974, clarinetist David Shifrin is in constant demand as an orchestral soloist, recitalist, and chamber music collaborator. He has appeared with many orchestras in the U.S. including those in Philadelphia, Minnesota, Dallas, Seattle, Houston, Milwaukee, and Detroit and with orchestras in Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Japan, Korea and Taiwan. In addition, he has served as principal clarinetist with the Cleveland Orchestra, the American Symphony Orchestra, the Honolulu and Dallas symphonies, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and the New York Chamber Symphony. As a chamber musician he has collaborated frequently with such ensembles and artists as the Tokyo and Emerson String Quartets, Wynton Marsalis, and pianists Emanuel Ax and André Watts. As an artist member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center since 1989, he served as its artistic director from 1992 to 2004. Mr. Shifrin joined the faculty at the Yale School of Music in 1987 and was appointed Artistic Director of the Chamber Music Society of Yale and Yale’s annual concert series at Carnegie Hall in September 2008. He has also served on the faculties of The Juilliard School, University of Southern California, University of Michigan, Cleveland Institute of Music and the University of Hawaii.

Hailed by The New York Times for its “precision, assertiveness and vigor” and by the San Francisco Classical Voice for its “gripping intensity” and “suspenseful and virtuoso playing,” the Amphion String Quartet is a winner of the 2011 Concert Artists Guild Victor Elmaleh Competition. It was recently chosen for two prestigious programs—the Ernst Stiefel String Quartet-In-Residence at the Caramoor Festival for the 2012-13 season and the CMS Two Program of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center with the ensemble’s three-year membership beginning in 2013-14. The members of the Quartet first joined together for a performance at Sprague Hall at the Yale School of Music in February 2009. The response by the audience was the inspiration behind their desire to pursue a career as the Amphion String Quartet. Recent honors include the 2012 Salon de Virtuosi Career Grant in New York; First Prize at the Hugo Kauder String Quartet Competition in New Haven, CT; and First Prize in the Piano and Strings category as well as the Audience Choice Award at the 2010 Plowman Chamber Music Competition in Columbia, MO.

Sunday, September 30, 2012 at 4 p.m.

Program

Haydn: String Quartet op. 76 no. 5
Britten: String Quartet no. 2
Dvořák: String Quartet in F "American" op. 96

Recognized as one of the world’s great ensembles, the Takács Quartet plays with a unique blend of drama, warmth and humor, combining four distinct musical personalities to bring fresh insights to the string quartet repertoire.

In 2012, Gramophone announced that the Takács was the only string quartet to be inducted into its first Hall of Fame, along with such legendary artists as Jascha Heifetz, Leonard Bernstein and Dame Janet Baker. The ensemble also won the 2011 Award for Chamber Music and Song presented by the Royal Philharmonic Society in London. Based in Boulder at the University of Colorado, the Takács Quartet performs ninety concerts a year worldwide, throughout Europe as well as in Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea.

During the 2012-13 season, the Takács, newly-appointed as Associate Artists at Wigmore Hall in London, will present five concerts there, including the three Britten Quartets (to celebrate the composer’s 100th birthday year), the two Brahms viola quintets with British violist Lawrence Power, and the Schubert Cello Quintet with American cellist Ralph Kirshbaum. The Schubert Quintet will be released on Hyperion Records in the fall of 2012. The Quartet will also tour in North America with pianists Marc-André Hamelin and Garrick Ohlsson, including concerts at New York’s Lincoln Center.

The Quartet’s award-winning recordings include the complete Beethoven cycle on the Decca label. In 2005 the "Late Beethoven Quartets" won Disc of the Year and Chamber Award from BBC Music Magazine, a Gramophone Award and a Japanese Record Academy Award. Their recordings of the early and middle Beethoven quartets collected a Grammy, another Gramophone Award, a Chamber Music of America Award and two further awards from the Japanese Recording Academy. Of their performances and recordings of the "Late Quartets," the Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote "The Takács might play this repertoire better than any quartet of the past or present."

In 2006 the Takács Quartet made its first recording for Hyperion Records of Schubert’s D804 and D810. A disc featuring Brahms’ Piano Quintet with Stephen Hough was released to great acclaim in November 2007 and was subsequently nominated for a Grammy. Brahms’ Quartets Op. 51 and Op. 67 were released in the fall of 2008, and a disc featuring the Schumann Piano Quintet with Marc-André Hamelin was released in late 2009. The complete Haydn "Apponyi" Quartets, Op. 71 and 74, were released in November 2011.

The Quartet has also made sixteen recordings for the Decca label since 1988 of works by Beethoven, Bartók, Borodin, Brahms, Chausson, Dvořák, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert and Smetana. The ensemble’s recording of the six Bartók String Quartets received the 1998 Gramophone Award for chamber music and in 1999 was nominated for a Grammy. In addition to the Beethoven String Quartet cycle recording, the ensemble’s other Decca recordings include Dvořák’s String Quartet in E-flat Major, Op. 51 and Piano Quintet in A Major, Op. 81 with pianist Andreas Haefliger; Schubert’s "Trout Quintet" with Mr. Haefliger, which was nominated in 2000 for a Grammy Award; string quartets by Smetana and Borodin; Schubert’s Quartet in G Major and Notturno Piano Trio with Mr. Haefliger; the three Brahms string quartets and Piano Quintet in F Minor with pianist András Schiff; Chausson’s Concerto for violin, piano and string quartet with violinist Joshua Bell and pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet; and Mozart’s String Quintets, K515 and 516 with violist György Pauk.

The Takács Quartet is known for innovative programming. In 2007 it performed, with Academy Award–winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, Everyman, Quartet and A minor Quartet, opus 132 in Carnegie Hall, inspired by the Philip Roth novel. The group collaborates regularly with the Hungarian folk ensemble Muzsikas, performing a program that explores the folk sources of Bartók’s music. The Takács performed a music and poetry program on a fourteen city US tour with the poet Robert Pinsky. In 2010 the quartet collaborated with the Colorado Shakespeare Theatre and playwright David Morse in a production of Quartet, a play set in Beethoven’s later years when he was writing the A minor Quartet, Opus 132.

The members of the Takács Quartet are Christoffersen Faculty Fellows at the University of Colorado Boulder. They have helped to develop a string program with a special emphasis on chamber music, where students work in a nurturing environment designed to help them develop their artistry. The Quartet’s commitment to teaching is enhanced by summer residencies at the Aspen Festival and at the Music Academy of the West, Santa Barbara. They are also Visiting Quartet at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London.

The Takács Quartet was formed in 1975 at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest by Gabor Takács-Nagy, Károly Schranz, Gabor Ormai and András Fejér, while all four were students. It first received international attention in 1977 winning First Prize and the Critics’ Prize at the International String Quartet Competition in Évian, France. The Quartet also won the Gold Medal at the 1978 Portsmouth and Bordeaux Competitions and First Prizes at the Budapest International String Quartet Competition in 1978 and the Bratislava Competition in 1981. The Quartet made its North American debut tour in 1982. Violinist Edward Dusinberre joined the Quartet in 1993 and violist Roger Tapping in 1995. Violist Geraldine Walther replaced Mr. Tapping in 2005. In 2001 the Quartet was awarded the Order of Merit of the Knight’s Cross of the Republic of Hungary, and in March of 2011 each member of the Quartet was awarded the Order of Merit Commander’s Cross by the President of the Republic of Hungary.

Sunday, October 14, 2012, at 4 pm

Tara Helen O’Connor, flute; Randall Ellis, oboe; Alan R. Kay, clarinet;
Frank Morelli, bassoon; David Jolley, horn

Program

Reicha: Quintet op. 88 no.2
Nielsen: Quintet op. 43
Werner: Riverside
Françaix: Quintet No. 1

Created in 1994 by five eminent wind soloists, Windscape has won a unique place for itself as a vibrant, ever-evolving group of musical individualists, an "unquintet" which has delighted audiences throughout the US, Canada, and Asia. Windscape’s innovative programs and presentations are designed to take listeners on a musical and historical world tour; music and engaging commentary evoke vivid cultural landscapes of distant times and places. As Ensemble-in-Residence at the Manhattan School of Music, Windscape brings extensive teaching experience to motivational residencies. Their most recent CD features the works of Dvořák. Their performance of Bach’s Art of the Fugue with the Orion String Quartet, premiered for New York’s Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, was recorded for Deutsche Grammophon and will be available on iTunes. Forthcoming performances include the Terrace Theater at the Kennedy Center.

Sunday, January 20, 2013, at 4 pm

Program

Handel: Cantata for Soprano and Basso Continuo
Scarlatti: Cantata for Soprano and Basso Continuo
Purcell: Songs
Handel: Arias
Bach: Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue

As a solo harpsichordist, Bradley Brookshire has distinguished himself with an ongoing series of recitals encompassing all of J.S. Bach’s works for solo harpsichord. A pioneer in the union of early music and current technology, Brookshire (in conjunction with Purchase faculty members James McElwaine and Satoshi Arai) has initiated a new tradition of live, multimedia presentations of Bach’s works. This approach to the contrapuntal intricacies of Bach’s music projects a streaming video in open-score format. Contrapuntal devices are made clear by a running analysis, complemented by a rendering of the themes in contrasting colors. Mr. Brookshire tours widely with this presentation, bringing Bach’s music to audiences outside the mainstream of concert life; a recent performance (and a good example of his target audience) was held at the international headquarters of IBM, where the concert was presented to a live audience and via the Internet to the entire IBM community worldwide.

Mr. Brookshire is also a noted conductor of Baroque opera. His controversial 1995 Vox Classics recording of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas has become a standard alternative reading of the classic. He has served as Assistant Conductor at Glimmerglass Opera, Cover Conductor at Virginia Opera, and has twice conducted concertante performances at the New York City Opera.

Bradley Brookshire has taught at Yale University, where he led the Collegium Musicum; at Mannes College, where he led the Mannes Madrigal Singers; and at the Escuela Nacional de Musica in Mexico City, where he has mounted several concertante performances of Baroque operas. A member of the Purchase College Conservatory of Music faculty since 1998, Brookshire holds the position of Director of Graduate Studies and leads the Purchase College Camerata.

Anthony Roth Costanzo began performing professionally at the age of 11 and has since appeared in opera, concert, recital, film, and on Broadway.

2011/12 marked Mr. Costanzo’s debut at the Metropolitan Opera as Unulfo in Rodelinda with Renee Fleming. He subsequently created the role of Ferdinand in the Met’s new Baroque pastiche, The Enchanted Island, and later stepped into the lead role of Prospero. He also made his debut with Canadian Opera Company in Semele. In 2011 he appeared with the Opera Company of Philadelphia, the Boston Lyric Opera, and the Palm Beach Opera. In 2010 he made his debuts with the New York Philharmonic and the New York City Opera.

Mr. Costanzo was named a Grand Finals winner of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions in 2009, won a George London Award and a career grant from the Richard Tucker Foundation. He became the first countertenor to win first place in the Houston Grand Opera Eleanor McCullon Competition.

Mr. Costanzo graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton University and was awarded the Lewis Sudler Prize for extraordinary achievement in the arts. He received his Master of Music at Manhattan School of Music, where he received the Hugh Ross Award for a singer of unusual promise.

Sunday, March 3, 2013, at 4 pm

Program

Chopin: Nocturnes op. 27 nos. 1 and 2
Brahms: Sonata No. 3  in  F minor op. 5
Hough: Sonata No. 2 “Notturno Luminoso”
Schumann: Carnival op. 9

With a singular artistic vision that transcends musical fashions and trends, Stephen Hough is widely regarded as one of the most important and distinctive pianists of his generation. In recognition of his achievements, he was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 2001, joining prominent scientists, writers and others who have made unique contributions to contemporary life.

Stephen Hough has appeared with most of the major European and American orchestras and plays recitals regularly in the major halls and concert series around the world. He is also a guest at festivals such as Salzburg, Mostly Mozart, Aspen, Ravinia, Tanglewood, Blossom, Hollywood Bowl, Edinburgh, Aldeburgh and the BBC Proms, where he has made over 15 concerto appearances. Recent engagements include performances with the New York and London Philharmonics, the London and San Francisco Symphonies, a US tour with the Russian National Orchestra led by Vladimir Jurowski, and a worldwide televised performance with the Berlin Philharmonic under Sir Simon Rattle.

In 2009 Hough played recitals in the Royal Festival Hall as well as becoming the first British instrumentalist to give a solo recital on the main stage of Carnegie Hall in nearly 20 years. He also performed all of the works for piano and orchestra of Tchaikovsky over four BBC Proms and will return to the Chicago Symphony in 2010/11 to play the same Tchaikovsky cycle over six concerts. Other engagements include appearances with the orchestras of Pittsburgh, Madrid, Los Angeles, Budapest, Montreal, Houston, Gothenberg, Cleveland and Philadelphia, among others.

Mr. Hough is an exclusive Hyperion recording artist, and many of the over 50 CDs in his catalog have garnered international prizes, including the Deutsche Schallplattenpreis, Diapason d’or, Monde de la musique, several Grammy nominations, and eight Gramophone Magazine Awards, including Record of the Year in 1996 and 2003, and the Gramophone Gold Disc Award in 2008, which named his complete Saint-Saëns Piano Concertos as the best recording of the past 30 years. His 2005 live recording of the Rachmaninoff Piano Concertos became the fastest selling recording in Hyperion’s history while his 1987 recording of Hummel concertos is Chandos’ best-selling disc to date. His most recent releases are the “Complete Works for Piano and Orchestra” by Tchaikovsky with the Minnesota Orchestra led by Osmo Vänskä, and a Chopin recital, “Late Masterpieces.”

Stephen Hough is also an avid writer and composer. In addition to scholarly and critically-acclaimed CD liner notes and articles for music publications, he has written for The Guardian, The Times, and was invited by the Telegraph Media Group in December 2008 to start a cultural blog. Hough has written extensively about theology for the print media and has been interviewed on two special guest-edited episodes of BBC Radio 4’s The Today Programme by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor and Baroness Shirley Williams. Hough’s book, The Bible as Prayer, was published by Continuum and Paulist Press in 2007.

Earlier in 2007 Hough’s cello concerto The Loneliest Wilderness was premiered by Steven Isserlis and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, and two choral works, Mass of Innocence and Experience and Missa Mirabilis, were performed at London’s Westminster Abbey and Westminster Cathedral respectively. In January 2009 Hough’s trio, Was mit den Tränen geschieht, commissioned by members of the Berlin Philharmonic, received its world premiere at the Berlin Philharmonie. A string sextet, Requiem Aeternam: after Victoria, was commissioned by the National Gallery for its major autumn 2009 exhibition, “The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture 1600-1700.” Hough has also published numerous compositions with Josef Weinberger Ltd.

A resident of London, Stephen Hough is a visiting professor at the Royal Academy of Music in London and holds the International Chair of Piano Studies at his alma mater, the Royal Northern College in Manchester. In 2011 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Liverpool.

Sunday, March 11, 2012 at 4 p.m.

Program

Elgar: Serenade for Strings
Schoenberg: Transfigured Night
Brahms: Sextet in G Major, op. 36

After more than a decade before the public the Concertante String Ensemble has established itself as a chamber group combining in equal measure world class virtuosity and adventurousness. The six virtuoso members of the ensemble perform in varied combinations in a wide array of repertoire ranging from works by established masters to less often performed composers. As solo performers who have won important national and international music competitions, they have appeared in such major venues as New York’s Carnegie Hall, London’s Royal Festival Hall, and Shanghai’s Grand Theatre. Concertante has always had a strong commitment to new music, undertaking commissioning projects involving several contemporary composers.

Since its founding, Concertante has performed works of such noted composers as Josef Bardanashvili, Justine Chen, Tina Davison, Steven R. Gerber, David Ludwig, Jan Radzynski, Sheila Silver, and Oded Zehavi. It has also offered infrequently performed chamber works by such celebrated composers as Enesco, John Adams, Schoenberg, Martinu, Korngold, and Frank Bridge among others. Throughout its career Concertante has been active in the recording studio and has received high critical praise for its CDs on the internationally distributed Helicon label. Its most recent recording for this label features Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s String Sextet in D Major, op. 10, and Frank Bridge’s String Sextet in E-Flat Major (1912). For the 2010-11 season Concertante returns to perform its regular series at New York’s Merkin Hall and in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, at the Rose Lehrman Arts Center.

Sunday, February 12th, 2012 at 4 p.m.

Program:

Manuel de Falla:  Suite Populaire Espagnole for Violin and Piano
Dmitri Shostakovich:  Sonata, Op. 134
(Intermission)
Olivier Messiaen: Theme and Variations
John Adams:  Road Movies
Robert Schumann: Sonata No. 1 in A minor

Violinist Leila Josefowicz has won the hearts of audiences around the world with her honest, fresh approach to the repertoire as well as her dynamic virtuosity. A graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, where she studied with Jaime Laredo and Jascha Brodsky, Ms. Josefowicz came to national attention in 1994 when she made her Carnegie Hall debut with Sir Neville Mariner and the orchestra of The Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. She has since appeared with the world’s most eminent orchestras and conductors. A close collaborator of such leading contemporary composers as John Adams and Oliver Knussen, she is a strong advocate of new music, a characteristic which is reflected in her diverse programs and her enthusiasm for premiering new works. Ms. Josefowicz has recently premiered concertos written for her by Esa-Pekka Salonen, Steve Mackey and Colin Matthews. She has also played first performances of Thomas Ades’s Violin Concerto, Concentric Paths, most notably with the Philadelphia and Cleveland Orchestras and at the Aspen Music Festival. In recognition of her passionate advocacy and genuine commitment to the music of today, Ms. Josefowicz was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

Recent appearances in North America include performances with the Philadelphia, Cleveland and Minnesota Orchestras and the Chicago, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Baltimore, Dallas, Houston and Cincinnati Symphonies. Ms. Josefowicz has made Carnegie Hall appearances with the St. Louis Symphony and American Composers Orchestra and has played recitals in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, St. Paul, and at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall.

During the 2011/12 season Ms. Josefowicz appears with the Boston and San Francisco Symphonies playing the Salonen Concerto under the baton of the composer. She returns to the Toronto, National, Atlanta and Indianapolis Symphonies as well as to the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa and joins the Cleveland Orchestra and Franz Welser-Moest for a performance of the Adams Violin Concerto at the Lincoln Center Festival. She is also the Philadelphia Orchestra’s 2011/12 Artist in Residence.

Recent and upcoming engagements in Europe include appearances with the Royal Concertgebouw and Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestras, the London, Munich and Czech Philharmonics, the London Symphony, and the Finnish Radio Orchestra. Ms. Josefowicz will also perform the Salonen Concerto in London, Paris, Stockholm, Lisbon, Cologne, Berlin and Budapest.

Ms. Josefowicz’s debut recording with Sir Neville Marriner and the orchestra of The Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in 1994 for Philips Classics was awarded a Diapason d’or. Subsequent releases on that label include Solo, a disc of unaccompanied works, which also won a Diapason d’or, and Bohemian Rhapsodies, a collection of virtuosic works with orchestra. She has also recorded For the End of Time and Americana with pianist John Novacek and the Mendelssohn, Glazunov and Prokofiev concertos with the Montreal Symphony. In addition, Ms. Josefowicz’s Nonesuch CD of John Adams’ Road Movies received a 2004 Grammy nomination, and a recital disc featuring the Shostakovich Violin Sonata received a 2007 ECHO Award. She has recorded the Knussen Concerto, live and conducted by the composer, at the London Proms for Deutsche Gramophone. Her most recent recording, The Dharma at Big Sur with John Adams conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic, has been released on iTunes.

A recipient of the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant in 1994 and a 2007 United States Artists Cummings Fellowship, Ms. Josefowicz currently performs on a Del Ges� made in 1724.

Pianist and composer John Novacek regularly tours the Americas, Europe and Asia as solo recitalist, chamber musician and concerto soloist. In the latter capacity he has presented over thirty concerti with dozens of orchestras. Mr. Novacek studied piano with Peter Serkin, Bruce Sutherland, and Jakob Gimpel. His chamber music teachers were Jamie Laredo and Felix Galimir. A dynamic soloist as well as collaborator, he took top prizes at both the Leschetizky and Joanna Hodges international piano competitions.

Mr. Novacek’s major American performances have been heard in Carnegie Hall, Avery Fisher Hall and Alice Tully Hall as well as the 92nd Street Y, Columbia University’s Miller Theater, Merkin Concert Hall, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Symphony Space. He has also performed at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, at Boston’s Symphony Hall, Chicago’s Symphony Center and at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles as well as in such international venues as the Th��tre des Champs-�lys�es in Paris, at London’s Wigmore Hall, and most of the major concert halls of Japan. He is also a frequent guest artist at festivals here and abroad, including New York City’s Mostly Mozart Festival, the Aspen, Caramoor, Chautauqua, and Colorado College festivals, and at Ravinia, Wolf Trap, Verbier, and the BBC Proms in England.

Often heard on radio broadcasts worldwide, John Novacek has appeared on NPR’s Performance Today, on St. Paul Sunday, and on A Prairie Home Companion. He has also been frequently seen and heard on television including on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, on Entertainment Tonight, and on CNN International. Mr. Novacek is a much- sought-after collaborative artist. In addition to appearing with Leila Josefowicz, he has performed with Joshua Bell, Cho-Liang Lin, Yo-Yo Ma, Elmar Oliveira and Emmanuel Pahud as well as with the Colorado, Harrington, Jupiter, New Hollywood, St. Lawrence, SuperNova, and Ying String Quartets. He also tours widely as a member of Intersection, a piano trio that includes violinist Kaura Frautschi and cellist Kristina Reiko Coooper. Mr. Novacek has given numerous world premieres and worked closely with composers John Adams, John Harbison, Jennifer Higdon, George Rochberg, John Williams, and John Zorn.

Sunday, November 13, 2011 at 4 p.m.

Program

Esa-Pekka Salonen: Homunculus for String Quartet (2007)
Mozart: Quartet No. 22 in B-flat, K. 589
Respighi: String Quartet in D Major (1907)

Returning to Candlelight Concerts by popular demand, the Johannes Quartet brings together the first American to win the Paganini Violin Competition in 24 years, Soovin Kim, and Concert Artists Guild Competition winner, Jessica Lee. The quartet’s violist, C. J. Chang, is the Principal Violist of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and cellist Peter Stumpf is the Principal with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The collaboration among these fine musicians was forged at the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont, and shaped by the legendary Guarneri String Quartet. Indeed, the Johannes continues a legacy of excellence which stretches back to the Budapest String Quartet in the early twentieth century.

In addition to its recent broadcasts on Performance Today and St. Paul Sunday and a triumphant Carnegie Hall debut, the Johannes has had great successes with audiences and critics all over the country. During the 2007-08 and 2008-09 seasons the Johannes collaborated with the Guarneri String Quartet in a program featuring William Bolcom’s Octet: Double Quartet, especially written for them and commissioned by the Music Accord consortium of presenters. They also premiered a newly commissioned string quartet, Homunculus, written for the Johannes Quartet by Esa-Pekka Salonen. For their performances of these groundbreaking works, they received acclaim from audiences across the country, most notably at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the Santa Fe Chamber Festival.

Sunday, September 25, 2011 at 4 p.m.

Program

Schumann: Kinderszenen, op. 15
Mozart: Fantasy in C minor, K. 475
Mozart: Sonata in B-flat, K. 281
Schumann: Kreisleriana, op. 16

Richard Goode’s music making recently prompted a critic to remark that he’d “swear the composer himself was at the keyboard, expressing musical thoughts that had just come into his head.” The American pianist’s tremendous emotional power, depth and expressiveness can be heard in recitals, chamber and orchestral collaborations around the world as well as in a series of highly acclaimed Nonesuch recordings including the recent Nonesuch release of the complete Beethoven concerti.

Over the past seasons, Mr. Goode has performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Herbert Blomstedt and with the Cleveland Orchestra under Ivan Fischer. Carnegie Hall featured Richard Goode in an eight-event series entitled Perspectives, and Mr. Goode was invited to hold master classes at New York’s three leading conservatories — Juilliard, Manhattan and Mannes —  as well as to give two illustrated talks on his Perspectives repertoire at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His orchestral appearances included the Boston Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, the Concertgebouw Orchestra, and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France.

A native of New York, Richard Goode studied privately with Elvira Szigeti and Claude Frank, with Nadia Reisenberg at the Mannes College of Music and with Rudolf Serkin at the Curtis Institute. He has won many prizes including the Young Concert Artists Award, the Clara Haskil Competition, the Avery Fisher Prize, and a Grammy Award with clarinetist Richard Stoltzman. His remarkable interpretations of Beethoven came to national attention when he played all five concerti with the Baltimore Symphony under David Zinman and when he performed the complete cycle of sonatas at New York’s 92nd Street Y and Kansas City’s Folly Theater. For the New York Times the cycle was among the season’s most important and memorable events. Subsequent performances around the country were similarly triumphant.

Richard Goode has appeared with many of the world’s greatest orchestras including the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Ozawa, the Chicago Symphony under Eschenbach, the Cleveland Orchestra under Zinman, the San Francisco Symphony under Blomstedt, the Deutsches Symphonie Orchester under Ashkenazy, and the BBC Symphony under Belohlavek at the London Proms. He has also appeared with the Orchestre de Paris, toured with Ivan Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra, and made his Musikverein debut with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. He has been heard throughout Germany in sold-out concerts with the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields under Sir Neville Marriner.

Mr. Goode serves with Mitsuko Uchida as co-Artistic Director of the Marlboro Music School and Festival in Marlboro, Vermont. He is married to the violinist Marcia Weinfeld. When the Goodes are not on tour (with each new city offering the chance to visit a new or favorite bookstore), they and their collection of some 5,000 volumes live in New York City.