Summer concert

It’s a rare treat to hear two world-class pianists at the same time, so mark your calendars for this performance by George Li and Peter Henderson, the Festival’s Principal Keyboard. They’ll play Schubert’s Fantasy in F Minor, a haunting piece, in which according to one critic, “we hear Schubert’s soul pouring itself out like a nightingale in the flowering shrubs.” Following, Festival musicians join Li for Schumann’s Piano Quintet, a piece widely regarded as one of the composer’s finest compositions. It was the first piano quintet ever written and was premiered featuring the composer’s spouse, pianist Clara Schumann (a gifted musician in her own right!).

In 1942, the BBC commissioned Benjamin Britten to put six English poems to music as a portrayal of life in England. The authors included Tennyson, Blake, and Keats. Tenor Nicholas Phan and Principal Horn William VerMeulen will converse through music in Britten’s resulting Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings. In Mother Goose., Maurice Ravel set five fairy tales to music as a gift to two children of his good friends for them to play on the piano. He later turned it into a complete ballet score, which the Festival Orchestra will perform in this concert.

The “awakening of cheerful feelings upon arriving in the country.” That might describe the drive into the Wood River Valley, but it’s also the label Beethoven applied to the first movement of his sixth symphony! In this explicitly programmatic work, Beethoven references sounds heard in nature, including birdcalls, a burbling brook, a terrifying summer thunderstorm, and a shepherd’s song. Throughout, one can easily imagine the composer strolling through his beloved Austrian countryside, enjoying a respite from bustling Vienna. The program opens with Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3, a piece which Beethoven decided was too grand to be anything else but self-sufficient.

Hailed by The Times as “without question the most astounding pianist of our age,” Daniil Trifonov won a Grammy Award in 2018, was Musical America’s 2019 Artist of the Year, and has seven albums in Billboard’s Top classical Album charts. After performing Pictures at an Exhibition in the Festival’s virtual season in 2020, Trifonov will appear in person to play Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1, a work conceived amidst the pressure the composer felt in living up to the expectations of his mentor, Robert Schumann. A vision from a dream inspired Brahms to transform a modest work for two solo pianos into a piano concerto, pairing the soloist and orchestra as equal partners. The result is a quintessential Brahms masterpiece, full of complexity and ambition, and following the model of great concertos by Beethoven and Mozart.