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Chamber Series Presents Musicians from Marlboro-Group II December 2
Our Chamber Series welcomes Musicians from Marlboro Group II Saturday, December 2, at 7 p.m. This program pairs Ralph Vaughan Williams’s powerful Blake Songs for tenor and oboe with Scottish composer Helen Grime’s exhilarating Oboe Quartet and the expansive majesty of Brahms’s Piano Quartet in A Major.
Performers joining tenor Patrick Bessenbacher will include Itamar Zorman, violin; Haesue Lee, viola; Brannon Cho, cello; Filippo Gorini, piano; and Mary Lynch VanderKolk, oboe
Musicians from Marlboro tours are noted not only for their joyous performances but also for offering valuable touring experience to artists at the beginning of their careers and touring with unusual chamber repertoire. In the words of the Washington Post, “Musicians from Marlboro is a virtual guarantee of musical excellence!”
Brattleboro Camerata Presents “Treasure Hidden Within” December 10
The Brattleboro Camerata presents “Treasure Hidden Within,” a program exploring how composers take pre-existing music and hide it within the structure of a new piece, infusing the latter with the essence of the older work. The concert is scheduled for Sunday, December 10, at 4 p.m. at the BMC.
The “hidden treasures” in the December 10 concert include a popular secular Medieval tune (embedded in Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina’s Missa L’homme armé a 4), sacred Gregorian chant melodies (hidden in Maurice Duruflé’s Quatre Motets sur des Thèmes Grégoriens), a musical puzzle / cryptogram (embedded in Josquin Desprez’s Missa La sol fa re mi), and a challenge melody from a composition contest (Giuseppe Verdi’s “Ave Maria”).
“The practice of weaving a pre-existing melody into new music has its origins in the Medieval era, and really blossomed into a widespread practice during the Renaissance,” says Camerata Music Director Jonathan Harvey. “Our December program is an attempt to demonstrate the different ways composers can create hidden meanings with this technique, from the Renaissance all the way up to the 20th century.”
The Brattleboro Camerata is preparing a Spring 2024 program titled “Make it a Place of Springs,” which will consist of pieces focused on nature and the natural world, including Renaissance works by Clement Janequin, Maddalena Casulana, Thomas Tallis, Vicente Lusitano, Thomas Morley, and others, as well as more recent pieces by Charles Stanford, Benjamin Britten, and Pulitzer Prize-winner Caroline Shaw.
