ALERT: This week’s FREE Friday Noon Musicale at the First Unitarian Society of Madison, 900 University Bay Drive, features the Passcaglia Duo of Norwegian composer Johan Halvorsen and String Quartet No. 5 by American contemporary composer Philip Glass.
Performers are violinists Kaleigh Acord, Elspeth Stalter and Ela Mowinski; violist Shannon Farley; and cellist Morgan Walsh. The concert, which runs from 12:15 to 1 p.m., will be streamed live on the Facebook page of Noon Musicales.
By Jacob Stockinger
Separately and together, The Ear loves piano and strings.
So you can imagine the appeal of a concert that will take place this Sunday night at 7:30 p.m. in Shannon Hall at the Wisconsin Union Theater.
That’s when the veteran and venerable Takacs Quartet (below) and acclaimed pianist Garrick Ohlsson will join forces in a terrific all-masterpiece program.
The concert has all the makings of a MUST-HEAR event for chamber music fans.
The award-winning Takacs Quartet, founded 42 years ago in Hungary and widely recorded and honored, will play two string quartets.
The late String Quartet No. 21 in D Major, K. 575, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (below), is the first of the composer’s three so-called “Prussian” quartets.
Known for a more relaxed style than the earlier “Haydn” quartets by Mozart, the Prussian quartets were composed for the King of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm II (below), who was a talented amateur cellist.
The Takacs will also perform the seven-movement String Quartet No. 11 in F minor by Dmitri Shostakovich (below). It is one of The Ear’s very favorite of the 16 quartets written by the Russian composer who endured the torments and treacheries of the Stalinist terror in the Soviet Union.
Then Garrick Ohlsson (below) will join in for the Piano Quintet in F Minor by Johannes Brahms. It is one of the four or five crowning quintets for piano and string quartet.
The Ear loves the playing of both artists and the program should be deeply interesting and moving. The Takacs possesses a mastery of many styles and has recorded numerous quartets by Haydn, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Smetana, Janacek and, more recently, by Dvorak as well as a terrific complete cycle of the 16 Beethoven quartets.
But the Takacs has recorded little Mozart (two string quintets) and little Shostakovich (one quartet and a piano quintet), so The Ear looks forward to hearing the quartet’s take on those composers.
The Takacs has recorded the Brahms Piano Quintet, but with British pianist Stephen Hough and Hungarian pianist Andras Schiff, but that work too should be a memorable performance with Ohlsson, the only American ever to win the International Chopin Piano Competition. (You can hear the energetic and lyrical opening movement from the Takacs-Hough recording in the YouTube video at the bottom, which has an intriguing and colorful bar graph to emphasize the structure.)
Tickets are $10-$47. For more information about purchasing tickets plus a video and more background about the artists, go to:
By Jacob Stockinger
Recently retired Bethel Lutheran Church Director of Music and Worship Gary Lewis (below left), Luther Memorial Music Director Bruce Bengtson (below center), and Madison Symphony Orchestra Principal Organist and Curator Samuel Hutchison (below right) will perform the third installment of an organ Three-For-All.
The concert is this Saturday night at 7:30 p.m., in Overture Hall, where the three men will perform on the Klais Concert organ.
Tickets are $20.
For more information including the complete program –which includes music by Johann Sebastian Bach (the famous and dramatic Toccata and Fugue in D minor, which you can hear at bottom with an unusual and arresting bar graph in a YouTube video that has almost 26 million hits), Dietrich Buxtehude and Camille Saint-Saens — visit this link:
http://www.madisonsymphony.org/threeforall
A NEW STUDENT OPERA COMPANY
Mikko Rankin Utevsky (below), the versatile musician who founded the Madison Area Youth Chamber Orchestra (MAYCO) while he was in high school and who, now while studying at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music, conducts, plays the viola, sings and writes reviews for this blog, has sent the following word:
Dear friends,
I am conducting an all-Mozart concert this Sunday night, Jan. 24 at 7:30 p.m. in Mills Hall on the UW-Madison campus.
The program, which opens with the famous “Haffner” Symphony (No. 35 in D major, K. 385), is also the debut of Impresario Student Opera, a new company of which I am the music director. (NOTE: You can hear the robust first movement of the “Haffner” Symphony by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, conducted by the late Claudio Abbado, in a YouTube video at the bottom.)
We are, fittingly, presenting Mozart’s one-act German-language Singspiel “Der Schauspieldirektor” (“The Impresario”), plus the scene “Il core vi dono” from “Così fan tutte,” conducted by Dennis Gotkowski, with a cast of five excellent graduate singers and a small student chamber orchestra.
Below in rehearsal are (left to right are sopranos Anna Polum and Nicole Heinen, tenor Jiabao Zhang, mezzo-soprano Meghan Hilker, seated, pianist Dennis Gotkowski, and conductor Mikko Rankin Utevsky. Not pictured is baritone Gavin Waid.)
The program is FREE, with donations accepted to support the new company.
I hope to see you there!
Mikko
By Jacob Stockinger
BOO!
Today is Halloween 2015.
Trick or treat?
The Ear is giving out treats today.
Eeriness has played a role in classical music since its beginning.
So here are the 13 scariest pieces of classical music – with links to performances – as determined by Limelight magazine:
http://www.limelightmagazine.com.au/features/13-scariest-pieces-classical-music-halloween
And here is another selection of Halloween music, 10 pieces also with links to performances, from The Imaginative Conservative:
http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/10/classical-music-pieces-for-halloween.html
Together the two websites offer a wide variety of composers: Camille Saint-Saens, Franz Liszt, Johann Sebastian Bach, Modest Mussorgsky, Hector Berlioz, Bela Bartok, Arnold Schoenberg, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Gyorgy Ligeti, Antonin Dvorak, Josef Suk, Jean Sibelius, Andre Caplet, Carl Maria von Weber and Franz Schubert.
You could stream them loudly as you do trick-or-treat with neighborhood children.
But The Ear also wants to share what he finds to be a fascinating and irresistible but nonetheless spooky way of listening to the famous Organ Toccata and Fugue in D minor by Johann Sebastian Bach, a work that made both lists of music appropriate to Halloween.
The YouTube video uses an ingenious but spooky visual bar graph bar way to follow the music. Try it and see for yourself! Over 25 million people have!
Then leave any suggestions you have for Halloween music, along with a link to a YouTube or other performance if possible, in the COMMENT section.
The Ear wants to hear.
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