What happens when 16 of the finest horn players in North America get together and try to one-up each other in arrangements of songs ranging from classical to jazz to rock and roll? “It will be the Mother of All Horn Concerts,” says Bill VerMeulen, the Festival’s Principal Horn. Backed by a rhythm section, the masters of horn will deliver a rollicking good time in the Pavilion—don’t miss it!
Orli Shaham will open this concert with Ravel’s gorgeous and instantly recognizable Pavane for a Dead Princess. Following, she’ll join Festival Musicians for Reena Esmail’s Saans. The title means “breath” in Urdu, and Esmail wrote this lovely piece for a friend’s wedding (and later her fiancé played it at her own!). Then back to Ravel for his masterful Trio in A Minor for Violin, Cello, and Piano, a piece whose four movements progress from a dreamy beginning influenced by Basque dances through several sparkling and haunting melodies, to an energetic—even heroic—conclusion.
Themes of love and loss feature strongly in this program featuring mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke. First up are a pair of songs Brahms wrote for his friends, the great violinist Joseph Joachim and his wife, Amalie, hoping to bolster their rocky marriage. Chausson’s Chanson perpétuelle then depicts the distress of an abandoned woman, evoking memories of happy love, nostalgia, and anguish. Concluding the program, Cooke will sing Hector Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été (“Summer Nights”). Berlioz put six poems about unrequited love to music, creating a song cycle. It’s a musical form Mahler would employ several decades later in his Rückert Lieder, which Cooke will sing in the following concert.
Violinist Augustin Hadelich joins Festival Orchestra musicians for an evening of chamber music featuring Brahms’s Sextet No. 1 in B-flat Major. It’s a work of infectious joie de vivre, offering both songs and dances alongside lively musical conversations between the two violins, two violas, and two cellos. The second movement’s theme and variations have been featured in settings as diverse as Star Trek: The Next Generation and the 2001 French film The Piano Teacher.