Chamber Concert

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.

Schubert wrote “The Shepherd on the Rock” as a favor for a friend–a soprano–who asked for a piece that would allow her to express a wide range of emotions. Meechot Marrero will sing the vocal part, accompanied by piano and clarinet, with the latter sometimes imitating and other times enhancing her voice. Schubert’s Trout Quintet is one of his most beloved chamber works, and for good reason–it’s full of cheerful, beautiful, and catchy melodies.

Knighted in 2022, Sir Stephen Hough is a composer and author in addition to being one of the world’s finest pianists. For this concert, he will perform two solo piano pieces (including one he wrote) before joining with Festival Musicians for Antonin Dvořák’s Piano Quintet No. 2. Dvořák fills his Quintet with Bohemian song and dance elements that he wrote himself in the traditional style. It’s a happy piece that was instantly popular and still is, and it’s easy to hear why: a variety of alternative motifs, ranging in emotional quality, but always returning to graceful and joyful melodies.