Festival Finale: Love & Transformation
Our festival concludes with stories of love and transformation through the deeply expressive music of Strauss and Schoenberg. Written at the turn of the century, these masterworks paint pictures of lovers’ dilemmas, marital bliss, and the transcendent power of ultimate forgiveness and love.
COME EARLY for a final festival picnic, a late lunch?
*NOTE* Bon Appétit will not be offering concession sales for this concert.
Sponsors: William & Helen Jo Whitsell
Reed College, Kaul Auditorium
Premieres Sunday, 7/31 • 4:00 pm PT
Buy a Summer Festival Subscription!
Buy Single Tickets
Program
Click on any piece of music below to learn more about it.
- R. STRAUSS Sextet from ‘Capriccio’ Op. 85
RICHARD STRAUSS (1864 - 1949) Sextet from his opera Capriccio (1942)
By the early 1930s, Richard Strauss had established a venerable reputation as Europe’s preeminent living composer. However, after the rise of the Nazi regime, he struggled to find a path forward. Unwilling to engage with the political questions of the day, he focused instead on protecting his career and his family. In choosing the subject for his final opera, Capriccio (1942), Strauss maintained that risk-averse approach by addressing a solely artistic question: Which is more important to an opera, its words or its music?
The remarkable Sextet from Capriccio, now frequently excerpted as a stand-alone work, comes from the opera’s opening scene. When two characters hear a chamber ensemble performing the sextet in another room, they begin to argue about the relative importance of words and music. With its lush, inviting textures, the sextet makes a compelling case that music matters most. But, in the end, the debate ends in a tie; words and music both play an equally valuable role in making opera great.
— © Ethan Allred
- R. STRAUSS Love Songs
RICHARD STRAUSS (1864 - 1949) Love Songs
I. Einerlei (Sameness, 1918) Op. 69, No. 3
II. Nachtgang (Night Walk, 1895) Op. 29, No. 3
III. Zueignung (Devotion, 1885) Op. 10, No. 1
IV. Morgen! (Morning, 1894) Op. 27, No. 4Strauss composed the majority of his 200 art songs (“lieder” in German) before 1900 – over 40 years before his final opera Capriccio. His muse for most of these songs was none other than his wife, soprano Pauline von Ahna, and he wrote them with her voice in mind.
Einerlei (Sameness, 1918) sets a miniature poem by Achim von Arnim about how love manages to always feel new, even when things stay the same. Strauss’ pristine piano postlude captures the poem’s sentiment especially clearly, as two melodies entwine in sensuous parallel harmony.
Nachtgang (Night Walk, 1895), based on a poem by Otto Julius Bierbaum, depicts a romantic nighttime stroll during which the singer becomes overwhelmed by an uncontrollable feeling of adoration. In this song, Strauss takes a more restrained approach to the piano part, allowing the poetry’s unassuming beauty to come through in the singer’s impassioned delivery of the text.
Zueignung (Devotion, 1885), unlike most of Strauss’ songs, was originally written with a tenor voice in mind. Hermann von Glim’s poem expresses the idea that being loved can make you a better person than you thought you could be before. In the final verse, the mood suddenly transforms as the singer launches into the word “Heilig” (Holy), culminating in a final ecstatic exclamation, “Habe Dank!” (Be thanked!).Morgen! (Morning!, 1894) comes from Strauss’ Opus 27, his wedding gift to his wife. John Henry Mackay’s motionless poem revels in the joy that love can grow stronger with each passing morning. The first stanza’s ardent musical setting leads to a nearly timeless stillness in the second, as the singer sings of gazing into their lover’s eyes. Then, a piano postlude emerges to spin out the beautiful feeling for just a moment longer.
— © Ethan Allred
- ARNOLD SCHOENBERG ‘Verklärte Nacht’ (Transfigured Night), Op. 4
SCHOENBERG (1874 - 1951) Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), Op. 4
Although many know Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) only for his revolutionary atonal and 12-tone compositions, he began his career composing relatively approachable music inspired by Brahms and Wagner. Perhaps the greatest example of this early output is his 1899 tone poem for string sextet, Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night).
Tone poems or stories told entirely through music, evolved through the music of Franz Liszt, Antonín Dvořak, and especially Richard Strauss, among others. Their orchestral tone poems generally tell sweeping, dramatic stories filled with action and plot. Schoenberg, however, took the genre in a different direction, using the medium of chamber music to examine a far more intimate story based on Richard Dehmel’s 1896 poem Verklärte Nacht.
In Dehmel’s poem, a woman tells her lover she has become pregnant with another man’s child. Following a profound moment of transformation, self-acceptance, and understanding, the lovers agree to raise the child together. Schoenberg particularly admired Dehmel’s ability to capture the interaction between emotions and the natural world, writing to the poet, “from you we learned the ability to listen to our inner selves.”
Schoenberg’s music in Verklärte Nacht is positively approachable by today’s standards, but the perceived ambiguity of its harmonies provoked a furious response among his contemporaries. One such commentator snidely exclaimed, “[it sounds] like the score of Tristan had been smeared while the ink was still wet.” According to Schoenberg, fist fights even broke out at the first performance in Vienna.
While we might view this music as unrelated to Schoenberg’s more dissonant works, he believed that his entire output grew from the seeds planted in Verklärte Nacht. As he later said, “I have not stopped composing in the same style and manner as at the very beginning. The only difference is that I do it better now than before.”
—© Ethan Allred
Artists
-
Fleur Barron
Mezzo-soprano
-
Hailed as “a knockout performer” by The Times, Singaporean-British mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron was awarded the 2022 Schubert Prize alongside Brigitte Fassbender by the Schubertíada. She has been chosen by Het Concertgebouw as a “Hemelsbestormer” (Skystormer) for the 2022-23 season, and has been designated an Artistic Partner of the Orquesta Sinfonica del Principado de Asturias in Oviedo for several seasons beginning in 2022-23, for which she will curate and perform multiple projects each year. A passionate interpreter of opera, chamber music, and concert works ranging from the baroque to the contemporary, Fleur is mentored by Barbara Hannigan.
In the 2022-23 season, Fleur makes orchestral debuts with Orchestre de Paris, Junge Deutsche Philharmonie, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, Göteborgs Symfoniker on tour in Sweden and at Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie, Aix-en-Provence Festival, Slovenian Philharmonic, and Orquesta Sinfonica del Principado de Asturias. On the operatic stage, Fleur makes her debut with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra in the title role of Kaija Saariaho’s Adriana Mater. She also sings the title role in Hasse’s Marc Antonio e Cleopatra with the NDR Radiophilharmonie in Hannover, the title role in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas with La Nuova Musica for a recording on the Pentatone label, alto soloist in a new, staged production of Mozart’s Requiem at the Opéra National de Bordeaux, and Bersi in Andrea Chénier and Mallika in Lakmé for Opéra de Monte-Carlo, reprising Lakmé at Théâtre de Champs-Elysées. This season’s recital projects include concerts with Julius Drake at Het Concertgebouw, MiTO Festival in Milan and Turin, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, and at Spivey Hall in Atlanta. She also joins duo partner Kunal Lahiry for recitals at Wigmore Hall and Oxford Lieder Festival, and teams up with Malcolm Martineau for an all-Britten recital at Snape Maltings.
-
Gloria Chien
Piano & Artistic Director
-
Taiwanese-born pianist Gloria Chien has one of the most diverse musical lives as a noted performer, concert presenter, and educator. She made her orchestral debut at the age of sixteen with the Boston Symphony Orchestra with Thomas Dausgaard, and she performed again with the BSO with Keith Lockhart. She was subsequently selected by The Boston Globe as one of its Superior Pianists of the year, “who appears to excel in everything.” In recent seasons, she has performed as a recitalist and chamber musician at Alice Tully Hall, the Library of Congress, the Phillips Collection, the Dresden Chamber Music Festival, and the National Concert Hall in Taiwan. She performs frequently with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.
In 2009, she launched String Theory, a chamber music series in Chattanooga, Tennessee that has become one of the region’s premier classical music presenters. The following year she was appointed Director of the Chamber Music Institute at Music@Menlo. In 2017, she joined her husband, violinist Soovin Kim, as Artistic Director of the Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival in Burlington, Vermont. The duo became Artistic Directors at Chamber Music Northwest in Portland, Oregon in 2020. Chien studied extensively at the New England Conservatory of Music with Wha Kyung Byun and Russell Sherman. She, with Kim, were awarded Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s 2021 CMS Award for Extraordinary Service to Chamber Music.
Chien is Artist-in-Residence at Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee, and she is a Steinway Artist. Chien received her B.M., M.M., and D.M.A. degrees from the New England Conservatory of Music as a student of Russell Sherman and Wha-Kyung Byun.
Upcoming Concerts & Events
- Chien-Kim-Watkins Trio: Beethoven’s Complete Piano Trios “Triumph & Transcendence”
- Chien-Kim-Watkins Trio: Beethoven’s Complete Piano Trios “Breaking Boundaries”
- Chien-Kim-Watkins Trio: Beethoven’s Complete Piano Trios “Dawn of a New Age”
- EXCLUSIVE DONOR CONCERT: Emerson Quartet Farewell with Gloria Chien
-
Soovin Kim
Violin & Artistic Director
-
Soovin Kim enjoys a broad musical career regularly performing Bach sonatas and Paganini caprices for solo violin, sonatas for violin and piano ranging from Beethoven to Ives, Mozart and Haydn concertos and symphonies as a conductor, and new world-premiere works almost every season. When he was 20 years old, Kim received first prize at the Paganini International Violin Competition. He immersed himself in the string quartet literature for 20 years as the 1st violinist of the Johannes Quartet. Among his many commercial recordings are his “thrillingly triumphant” (Classic FM Magazine) disc of Paganini’s demanding 24 Caprices and a two-disc set of Bach’s complete solo violin works that were released in 2022.
Kim is the Founder and Artistic Director of the Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival (LCCMF) in Burlington, Vermont. In addition to its explorative programming and extensive work with living composers, LCCMF created the ONE Strings program through which all 3rd through 5th grade students of the Integrated Arts Academy in Burlington study violin. The University of Vermont recognized Soovin Kim’s work by bestowing an Honorary Doctorate upon him in 2015. In 2020, he and his wife, pianist Gloria Chien, became Artistic Directors of Chamber Music Northwest in Portland, Oregon. He, with Chien, were awarded Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s 2021 CMS Award for Extraordinary Service to Chamber Music. Kim devotes much of his time to his passion for teaching at the New England Conservatory in Boston and the Yale School of Music in New Haven.
Upcoming Concerts & Events
-
Daniel Chong
Violin
-
GRAMMY Award-winning violinist Daniel Chong is one of the most exciting and versatile musicians of his generation. Since 2002, as the founding first violinist of the Parker Quartet, he has garnered wide recognition for his performances in such venues as Carnegie Hall, the Library of Congress, the Musikverein, and Wigmore Hall. Additionally, recent solo engagements include appearances at National Sawdust in New York City, Seoul Arts Center, and Jordan Hall in Boston. Mr. Chong has received several awards and prizes such as the 2009-2011 Cleveland Quartet Award and top prizes at the Concert Artists Guild Competition and the Bordeaux International String Quartet Competition. In the recording realm, he can be heard on the Zig-Zag Territoires, Naxos, and Nimbus Records labels. Mr. Chong’s newest album was released last fall on the ECM New Series featuring the Parker Quartet and Kim Kashkashian.
Mr. Chong has performed at major music festivals including the Marlboro Music Festival, Mostly Mozart, Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and the Perigord Noir Music Festival. In addition to the core repertoire, Daniel is a strong advocate for new music. Some of the composers he has worked closely with are György Kurtág, Augusta Read Thomas, Helmut Lachenmann, and Chaya Czernowin. In 2011, he won a GRAMMY Award with the Parker Quartet for their recording of György Ligeti’s string quartets.
Actively engaged in pedagogy, Mr. Chong has given masterclasses throughout the United States and currently serves on the faculty at Harvard University.
-
Jordan Bak
Viola
-
Award-winning, Jamaican-American violist Jordan Bak has achieved international acclaim as a trailblazing artist, praised for his radiant stage presence, dynamic interpretations, and fearless power. Critics have described him as “an exciting new voice in Classical performance” (I Care If You Listen), “a powerhouse musician, with a strong voice and compelling sound” (The Whole Note) and lauded his “haunting lyrical grace” (Gramophone). A top prizewinner in many competitions such as the Sphinx Competition, Tertis International Viola Competition, and Concert Artists Guild Victor Elmaleh Competition, Bak was recently named one of ClassicFM’s “30 Under 30” Rising Stars, Musical America’s New Artist of the Month, and was a featured artist for WQXR’s inaugural Artist Propulsion Lab. Bak’s enthusiastically-received debut album IMPULSE has garnered over two million streams on major digital media platforms, featuring new compositions by Tyson Gholston Davis, Toshio Hosokawa, Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, Quinn Mason, Jeffrey Mumford, and Joan Tower.
Bak has appeared as soloist with such orchestras as the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Sarasota Orchestra, New York Classical Players, London Mozart Players, and Juilliard Orchestra among others, and as a chamber musician, has performed at numerous festivals such as Marlboro Music Festival, Tippet Rise, Chamber Music Northwest, and Newport Classical. Recent recital debuts include Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Concertgebouw, and at the Schleswig-Holstein and Lichfield music festivals. Bak currently serves as Assistant Professor of Viola at University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA) and has given masterclasses at Peabody Institute, Oberlin Conservatory, NYU Steinhardt, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, and Conservatorio del Tolima.
-
Jessica Bodner
Viola
-
Jessica Bodner, described by The New York Times as a “soulful soloist,” is the violist of the Grammy Award-winning Parker Quartet. A native of Houston, TX, Jessica began her musical studies on the violin at the age of two, then switched to the viola at the age of twelve because of her love of the deeper sonority.
Ms. Bodner has recently appeared at venues such as Carnegie Hall, 92nd Street Y, Library of Congress, Concertgebouw (Amsterdam), Wigmore Hall (London), Musikverein (Vienna), Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, and Seoul Arts Center, and has appeared at festivals including Chamber Music Northwest, Chamberfest Cleveland, Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival, Yellow Barn, Perigord Noir in France, Monte Carlo Spring Arts Festival, San Miguel de Allende, Istanbul’s Cemal Recit Rey, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Hitzacker, and Heidelberg String Quartet Festival. As a member of the Parker Quartet, she has recorded for ECM, Zig-Zag Territoires, Nimbus, and Naxos.
Recent collaborators include mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron, clarinetists Charles Neidich and Jörg Widmann, pianists Menahem Pressler, Shai Wosner, Gloria Chien, and Orion Weiss, violinists Soovin Kim and Donald Weilerstein, violists Kim Kashkashian and Roger Tapping, cellists Deborah Pae, Marcy Rosen, Natasha Brofsky, and Paul Katz, and percussionist Ian Rosenbaum.
Jessica is a faculty member of Harvard University’s Department of Music as Professor of the Practice in conjunction with the Parker Quartet’s appointment as Blodgett Quartet-in-Residence. She has held visiting faculty positions at the New England Conservatory and Longy School of Music, served as faculty at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and Yellow Barn Festival, and has given masterclasses at institutions such as Eastman School of Music, San Francisco Conservatory, Amherst College, University of Minnesota, and at the El Sistema program in Venezuela.
Outside of music, Jessica enjoys cooking, running, practicing yoga, and hiking with her husband, violinist Daniel Chong, their son, Cole, and their vizsla, Bodie.
-
Alexander Hersh
Cello
-
Having given his Carnegie Hall debut recital in 2022, cellist Alexander Hersh has quickly established himself as one of the most exciting and creative talents of his generation. He frequently appears as soloist with major orchestras, including the Houston Symphony and Boston POPS, and has received top prizes at competitions worldwide including the 2022 Pro Musicis International Award, Astral Artists National Auditions, Salon de Virtuosi Career grant, New York International Artists Association Competition, and the Schadt competition.
A passionate chamber musician, Hersh has performed on tour with Musicians from Marlboro and appeared at music festivals worldwide including Marlboro, Chamber Music Northwest, Caramoor, Ravinia, Music@Menlo, I-M-S Prussia Cove, Manchester, Amsterdam Cello Biennale, Kneisel Hall, and Lucerne. He serves as Co-Artistic Director of NEXUS Chamber Music, an artist driven collective of musicians whose mission is to make classical music culturally relevant through live concerts and multimedia content.
In 2023, Hersh released his debut album ABSINTHE, a project that marries his love of classical music with short films, comedy, and themed merchandise. The narrative-based videos are available on Hersh’s YouTube channel and the album is out now on all streaming platforms.
Raised in Chicago, Alexander Hersh began playing the cello at the age of five. He received his B.M. and M.M. from New England Conservatory where he graduated with academic honors. Later he was a recipient of the Frank Huntington Beebe fund for studies in Berlin where he studied at the Hanns Eisler Hochschule for Musik Berlin. His previous teachers have included Laurence Lesser, Hans Jørgen Jensen, Kim Kashkashian, Nicolas Altstaedt, and Paul Katz. He plays a G.B. Rogeri cello, courtesy of Guarneri Hall NFP and Darnton & Hersh Fine Violins.
-
Deborah Pae
Cello
-
Praised by critics for her “extraordinary musicianship” (San Diego Union Tribune), “superb tone,” and “high level of interpretative intelligence” (Transcentury), Korean-American cellist DEBORAH PAE has received international acclaim for her powerful performances, uncompromising curiosity for expression, and devotion to the arts. Pae has appeared as a soloist and chamber musician throughout North America, Europe, and Asia at venues including Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall in London, the National Concert Hall in Taipei, Palais des Beaux-Art in Brussels, Musée du Louvre in Paris, and the Berliner Philharmonie.
Pae is the cellist of two award-winning ensembles: the Formosa Quartet, recipients of the First Prize and Amadeus Prize at the 2006 International London Quartet Competition, and the Namirovsky-Lark-Pae Trio, winners of the 2020 German Record Critics Award/Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik in the category of chamber music, one of Europe’s most coveted honors, and Fono Forum’s 5 Best Albums of 2020 for their debut album Masterpieces Among Peers: Trios by Frank Bridge and Johannes Brahms. Within her wide-ranging repertoire, she is passionate about lifting up the works of living composers and introducing valuable yet lesser-known musical compositions to worldwide audiences. Through her work with the Formosa Quartet, the ensemble has given critically acclaimed performances of masterpieces in the string quartet repertoire while highlighting the musical traditions of indigenous nations in Taiwan and enticing audiences with their exclusive collection of world, folk, pop, jazz, and poetry arrangements. Over the span of 25 years, Pae’s performances have been augmented by numerous radio and television broadcasts and recordings for ECM, New World, TYXarts, Bridge, Fuga Libera, and Outhere Records.
A graduate of the Juilliard School, New England Conservatory, and an Associate Artist at the Chapelle Musicale Reine Elisabeth in Belgium, Ms. Pae is committed to mentoring the next generation of young artists. She is Associate Professor of Cello at Eastern Michigan University where she is a recipient of the 2021 Ronald W. Collins Distinguished Faculty Award in Creative Activity, the highest honor Eastern Michigan University presents to an individual faculty member; cello and chamber music faculty at the National Youth Orchestra of Canada, Formosa Chamber Music Festival, and Taipei Music Academy & Festival, and Faculty Emeritus at the Perlman Music Program. An advocate for equity in the arts, Pae serves as Governor on the board of The Recording Academy® Chicago Chapter. Her mentors have included cellists Gary Hoffman, Laurence Lesser, Joel Krosnick, André Emelianoff, and Nellis Delay; violist Kim Kashkashian, and violinist Itzhak Perlman.
Ms. Pae travels and performs with her trusty companion, a Vincenzo Postiglione cello (c. 1885) from Naples, Italy.