Join us for the chamber music concert "Mozart, Schumann, Enescu, & Tăutu Chamber Music" on Saturday, April 13, 2024, at the Steinway Piano Gallery Detroit. This is a collaboration between Saturdays with Classics and the American Romanian Festival.
The American Romanian Festival celebrates its 20th-anniversary season with an evening of works centered around the subject of travel and different geographic locations. First on the program is the recently commissioned piece by Ionica Pop, Impressions from Romania, reflects through music the joy of celebration and the need for human communion and peace. In The Seven Dreams of Frida Kahlo for Clarinet and String Quartet, composer Ovidiu Marinescu takes us on an imaginary journey of dreams, from Mayan ritual dances, to mariachi music, to be-bop jazz—which Frida Kahlo heard in New York in her travels with partner Diego Rivera, to an Arabic dream, as well as a pagan dance of Russian character. Steven Reich’s Different Trains for String Quartet and pre-recorded performance tape, expresses the basic idea that carefully chosen speech recordings generate the musical materials for musical instruments. The piece is inspired by the composer’s childhood when he travelled back and forth by train frequently between New York and Los Angeles from 1939 to 1942. While the trips were exciting and romantic at the time Steven Reich is looking back as an adult realizing that if he had been in Europe during this period, as a Jew he would have had to ride very different trains.
Mozart’s String Quartet No. 19 in C Major, K. 465, is nicknamed “Dissonance” due to the unusual, dissonant counterpoint found in its slow introduction. It is perhaps the most famous of his quartets. The 22-bar Adagio opens with quiet eighth-note Cs in the cello. The viola then joins on A-flat and the second violin on E-flat. The first dissonance is created once the first violin enters on an A, thus creating tension between the A-flat and A that will be a recurring feature in the entire quartet. This introduction presents the major ideas that will recur throughout the piece. Almost two hundred years later, Romanian composer Pascal Bentoiu’s String Quartet No. 2, “Consonance,” is an example of very tonal music in an age when dissonance is taken to exaggerated levels and reigns in much music of the time. Bentoiu believed that perhaps the consonant chords in his work will provoke the same unpleasantness as Mozart’s dissonant chords did in his String Quartet No. 19.
The Detroit Symphony Orchestra & The American Romanian Festival celebrating its 20th-anniversary season present an evening of works centered around the subject of death. The first work on the program, Rota II by Romanian composer Cornelia Tăutu, is a duet for violin and violoncello that opens slowly and austerely and evokes the contemplative nature of a long-forgotten ancestral melody. George Crumb’s reaction to the horrors of the Vietnam War is expressed through his threnody, Black Angels. The work is structured around the numbers 13 and 7, numerals often related to fate and destiny, and several tonal musical quotations can be found throughout the piece, including snippets from our next work on the program, Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” string quartet. Written in 1824, Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” was the composer’s coming to terms with his long-term illness and impending death, and has been called “one of the pillars of the chamber music repertoire.”
The American Romanian Festival celebrates its 20th-anniversary season with an evening of works centered around the subject of death. The recently commissioned piece by Ionica Pop, Remembering Ţăranu, employs a twelve-tone row, which also serves as a musical cryptogram to honor the recently deceased Romanian composer Cornel Ţăranu. George Crumb’s reaction to the horrors of the Vietnam War is expressed through his threnody, Black Angels. The work is structured around the numbers 13 and 7, numerals often related to fate and destiny, and several tonal musical quotations can be found throughout the piece, including snippets from our next work on the program, Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” string quartet. Written in 1824, Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” was the composer’s coming to terms with his long-term illness and impending death, and has been called “one of the pillars of the chamber music repertoire.”
The American Romanian Festival celebrates its 20th-anniversary season with an evening of unique music by Enescu and other Romanian composers. Also featured are works for cimbalom, including a recent commission by composer Colin Martin for string quartet and cimbalom. Enjoy an evening of lyrical lines, dynamic and punctuated rhythms, and Romanian flair.
