Alasdair Neale, Music Director

A quintet of the orchestra’s acclaimed brass players kicks off a musical journey with music of the Renaissance. Then, Amos Yang delves into the baroque with the last of Johann Sebastian Bach’s iconic Cello Suites. Heading into the 1950s, Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story gets the brass treatment, while celebrated violinist Leila Josefowicz brings you into the 21st century with an excerpt from Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Lachen Verlernt (Laughing Unlearnt), a modern work in the form of a chaconne that neatly lends a nod back to Bach.

Festival mainstays Kristin Ahlstrom, Bjorn Ranheim, and Peter Henderson will be your guides through Beethoven’s Piano Trio in B-flat Major. Better known as the “Archduke,” its dedicatee was Archduke Rudolph of Austria, a musical dilettante and gifted amateur pianist. Full of originality, the 45-minute work was Beethoven’s final full-scale piano trio and ranges from joy to sadness with outbursts of bluff good humor. The work’s first performances with the increasingly deaf composer, accompanied by Ignaz Schuppanzigh on violin and Josef Linke on cello, would mark Beethoven’s last public appearance as a pianist.

Sit back and enjoy a quartet of cellists led by Amos Yang playing cleverly arranged versions of Mozart’s Overture to The Marriage of Figaro; Handel’s “Ombra mai fu,” the famous aria from Xerxes sung in appreciation of a plane tree; and even a hit song by the Beatles. Keeping things contemporary, Si-Yan Darren Li and Marc Damoulakis play Osvaldo Golijov’s haunting Mariel for Cello and Marimba before a quartet of percussionists round things off with Steve Reich’s hypnotic Mallet Quartet for Marimbas and Vibraphones.