Palaver Strings Pre-Concert “Meet the Composer”

Our Season Guest Series Palaver Strings concert Friday, January 6, will be preceded by a pre-concert ‘meet the composer’ talk.

The 7:30 p.m. concert will be held at the BMC. Our Artist-in-Residence Ashleigh Gordon, one of the night’s performers, will give a pre-concert talk from 6:30 to 7:10 p.m. in the smaller BMC recital hall.  She will be interviewing via Zoom composer Jeffrey Mumford, whose work is on the program.

Titled “Painted Dreams,” the January 6 concert recalls sunnier times in the depths of a New England winter. It begins with Reena Esmail’s Nadiya for Violin and Viola and continues with the subtle textures of Mumford’s string quartet, A Veil of Liquid Diamonds. An avid painter as well as a composer, Mumford writes that his work is “inspired by cloud imagery, suspended structures that continually split off and recombine as analogous to the formation of layers of simultaneous musical development.”

The concert concludes with the epic Souvenir de Florence, Op. 70, written by Tchaikovsky on one of his visits to Italy. This epic piece is full of dashing escapades, romantic sentiments, and nostalgia for home, drawing on both Italian themes and the Russian melodies of Tchaikovsky’s homeland.

Performers include Brianna Fischler, Maya French, Ashleigh Gordon, Domenic Salerni, Matthew Smith, and Nathaniel Taylor.