The Well-Tempered Ear
Classical music: The impressive second weekend of four concerts by the Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society adds elements of theater and dance to chamber music
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By Jacob Stockinger
The second weekend of the three-weekend summer series of concerts by the Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society features two performances each of two programs.
The programs in this 27th season with its “Toy Stories” theme – “Play-Do(h)” and “GI Joe” – will be performed at The Playhouse (below) of the Overture Center on Friday and Saturday night at 7:30 p.m.
Sunday performances are at the Hillside Theater (below) at Taliesin, at the Frank Lloyd Wright compound in Spring Green, at 2:30 and 6:30 p.m.
Each program introduces elements of drama, using a narrator, and of dance.
The works include “The Kitchen Revue” by Bohuslav Martinu and “The Masked Ball” by Francis Poulenc as well as “Einstein on Mercer Street” by American composer Kevin Puts and “The Solder’s Tale” by Igor Stravinsky. (You can hear the first part of the Stravinsky work — “The Soldier’s March” — with Jeremy Irons narrating and the composer conducting in the YouTube video at the bottom.)
The baritone singer is Timothy Jones (below top), a longtime favorite of BDDS audiences, and Milwaukee-based hip-hop dancer and choreographer Blake Washington (below bottom), who is returning for his second season with BDDS.
Here is a link to the introduction and complete schedule to the entire summer season, including a FREE concert of “American Haiku: for violin and cello this coming Wednesday night:
Also included this weekend are various works for bassoon, flute, oboe, clarinet, trumpet, double bass and percussion by Alexandre Tansman; Georg Philipp Telemann, Gabriel Pierné and Robert Schumann.
A bonus to notice: This year for the first time, at the Hillside Theater at Taliesin, Enos Farms is offering picnic dinners that can be ordered, then picked up and eaten outside or in the Taliesin dining room. For food reservations, go to Tickets at http://bachdancing.org
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Classical music: This year’s Token Creek Chamber Music Festival will explore “Necessary Music” by Bach, Schubert, Schumann, Ravel, Harbison and other composers from Aug. 26 through Sept 3
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By Jacob Stockinger
The Ear has received the following announcement to post about an annual event that puts on a lot of MUST-HEAR programs:
TOKEN CREEK, WIS. – In what way, and for whom, is a certain kind of music necessary?
Certainly the presenters of a chamber music festival would be presumptuous to offer a program as a sort of prescription for listeners. And at Token Creek we won’t.
So often the music we need arrives by chance, and we did not even know we needed it until it appears. And other times we know exactly what we are missing. And so we offer this year’s programs of pieces that feed the soul.
Saturday, Aug. 26, at 8 p.m. and Sunday, Aug. 27, at 4 p.m., Program I: Continuo
Some works of art are so rich that they sustain a lifetime of inquiry and encounters, each time revealing fresh new insights only possible through sustained engagement, pieces so resilient they admit multiple interpretations, approaches, nuances, shadings.
We open the season with music of Johann Sebastian Bach (below), pieces we’ve played before and some we have not, music that continues to compel for the very reason that it can never be fully plumbed, music that rewards over and over again. In a concert dominated by Bach, the requirement of the other pieces is really only that they offer sufficient originality and integrity not to be dwarfed or rendered ephemeral by his authority.
Flutist Dawn Lawler (below top), cellist Sara Sitzer (below second) and pianist Jeffrey Stanek (below third join the artistic directors composer-pianist John and violinist Rose Mary Harbison (below bottom) for this opening program.
Works:
BACH Sonata in E minor for violin and continuo, BWV 1023
HAYDN Trio in F major for flute, cello and piano XV:17
BACH Two Fugues, from The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080
HARBISON Mark the Date, for flute and piano (pre-premiere)
BACH Sonata in G major for violin and continuo, BWV 1021
BACH Three-Voice Ricercar, from The Musical Offering, BWV 1079
BACH Sonata in C minor, from The Musical Offering, BWV 1079
Wednesday, Aug. 30, at 7:30 p.m. Program II: Schubert
A sequel to last year’s all-Schubert program, which offered Die Schöne Müllerin and the “Trout” Quintet, this season we offer two late masterworks by Schubert (below): the song cycle Schwanengesang (Swan Song) and the solo piano set of six Moments Musicaux (Musical Moments).
In structure, ingenuity and invention these two large works offer an eloquent counterpoint and complement to one another. We are pleased to welcome back pianist Ya-Fei Chuang (below top), and to introduce tenor Charles Blandy (below middle) with pianist Linda Osborn (below bottom).
Works:
SCHUBERT Andante, from Sonata in C for Piano Four Hands (“Grand Duo”), D.812
SCHUBERT Moments Musicaux, D.780
SCHUBERT Schwanengesang, D.957
Saturday, Sept. 2, at 8 p.m. and Sunday, Sept. 3, at 4 p.m. Program III: Waltz
This program explores the familiar form of the waltz as an unexpectedly flexible and diverse musical type, with uncommon approaches from a wide variety of composers from Schubert through Sur.
We conclude the season with Schumann’s splendid Piano Quartet, whose third movement offers one of the greatest of slow waltzes of all time. (You can hear it performed by the Faure Quartet in the YouTube video at the bottom.)
We are pleased to introduce violist Becky Menghini (below top) and cellist Kyle Price (below bottom).
Works:
FRITZ KREISLER Three Old Viennese Melodies for Violin and Piano
DONALD SUR Berceuse for Violin and Piano
SCHUBERT Waltz Sequence
RAVEL Valses nobles et sentimentales
GEORGE CRUMB Sonata for Solo Cello
SCHUMANN Quartet in E-flat for Piano and Strings, Op. 47
The Token Creek Festival has been called a gem, a treasure nestled in the heart of Wisconsin cornfields, a late-summer fixture just outside of Madison.
Now in its 28th season, the Festival has become known for its artistic excellence, diverse and imaginative programming, a deep engagement with the audience, and a surprising, enchanting and intimate performance venue in a comfortable refurbished barn.
The 2017 festival offers five events to close the summer concert season, Aug. 26–Sept. 3.
Performances take place at the Festival Barn (below), on Highway 19 near the hamlet of Token Creek (10 minutes north of Madison, near Sun Prairie) with ample parking available.
The charmingly rustic venue—indoors and air-conditioned with modern comforts—is invitingly small, and early reservations are recommended.
Concert tickets are $32 (students $12). Reservations can be secured in several ways:
- Online: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/token-creek-chamber-music-festival-2017-necessary-music-tickets-36091343179
- Website: www.tokencreekfestival.org (a link to our online ticketing, or a printable order form)
- Phone: 608-241-2525 (voicemail only, please leave a message)
- Email: info@tokencreekfestival.org
- U.S. mail: P.O. Box 5201, Madison WI, 53705
More information about the Token Creek Festival and all events and artists can be found at the website, www.tokencreekfestival.org or by calling 608-241-2525.
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Classical music: The Token Creek Festival celebrates Wisconsin poet Lorine Niedecker this Tuesday afternoon and evening with a forum, a picnic and a recital.
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By Jacob Stockinger
The Ear’s friends at the Token Creek Festival write:
On this Tuesday, August 25, the Token Creek Festival shines a lens on one of Wisconsin’s most important artists: the American poet Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970), whose recognition and appreciation have been delayed until recently.
Many poets of the 20th century have worked in what is broadly known as the Imagist mode: short lines, brief phrases, elusively stated thoughts. At its most eloquent it can give us the great range and imagination of William Carlos Williams, as well as decades of other very convincingly compressed writers from Emily Dickinson through Gary Snyder.
In Lorine Niedecker we feel the pressure of what has been left out, the hard journey to final shape. We infer a “story” behind it, and we marvel at the courage and art that set it down so briefly.
We can also admire the persistence that drove her to continue to write all through her life, when she received little support or recognition. Niedecker cleaned hospital rooms, and hung barely above the poverty level throughout her life, which she led mainly in a cottage on Blackhawk Island (below) near Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. (You can hear a reading of her poem “My Life by Water” in a YouTube video at the bottom.)
According to Ann Engelman, president of the Friends of Lorine Niedecker, she “has been called the poet of place because her imagery is so grounded in the area where she lived. Basil Bunting called her “the Emily Dickinson of this century.”
As an objectivist poet, the simplicity of her images helps us sense our own experiences with the elements around us.” Niedecker (below, in a photo from her later years, courtesy of the Poetry Foundation) had a strange life that included a truncated college education and long stretches of isolation as well as an extended epistolary (and, briefly, physical) friendship with fellow poet Louis Zukofsky; her existence resonates in her verse.
Three years ago the Token Creek Festival began a concerted look at the land where the festival takes place (below, in a photo by Jess Anderson), exploring intersections between art and nature. The theme continues in the multi-part Niedecker-inspired event, “Paean to Place,” on this Tuesday.
Here is a schedule:
- 4 p.m. Forum. “Finding Lorine Niedecker” will introduce the poet through audio and video footage. A wide-ranging conversation between biographer Margot Peters and composer John Harbison will explore Niedecker’s work, and the event will conclude with performances of music inspired by, or settings of, her evocative texts.
- 6 p.m. Picnic. Festival attendees are invited to a first -ever Token Creek picnic at the farm—an elegant feast of savory summer fare.
- 7:30 p.m. Recital: “Longing for Place.” Pianist Ryan McCollough and soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon are two outstanding performers who represent their own youthful generation, searching for what is best and most characteristic in the work of their time. In 2015 our relationship to the natural world is even more fragile and elusive than it was to Lorine Niedecker. Still artists seek to frame that relationship, and render it with their new developing languages.
McCullough and Fitz Gibbon’s recital on themes of nature and place and longing includes works by Henry Purcell, Kaija Saariaho, Nicholas Vines and Robert Schumann, as well as new song cycles by John Harbison — a co-founder and co-director of the Token Creek Festival — and Niccolo Athens.
Harbison’s settings of Niedecker poems, commissioned by the Boston Symphony’s Tanglewood Music Festival and premiered there this summer, “let the words speak clearly, syllable by syllable, but he adds expressive space into the texts’ phrases and expands its melodic contours, heightening the sense of the poems being mediums of internal, very personal, monolog” (from the Tanglewood program booklet, July 2015).
“Paean to Place” is presented in collaboration with the Friends of Lorine Niedecker, Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin.
Tickets are $15-$30 (students $10). Packages are available.
Tickets can be purchased by using the order form at the Token Creek website www.tokencreekfestival.org, by phone at 608-241-2525, by email at info@tokencreekfestival.org, or by U.S. mail at P.O. Box 5201, Madison WI, 53705.
Performances take place at the Festival Barn, on Highway 19 near the hamlet of Token Creek (10 minutes north of Madison) with ample parking available. The concert venue (below), indoors and air-conditioned, is invitingly small—early reservations are recommended.
More information about the Token Creek Festival and all events can be found at the website, http://www.tokencreekfestival.org or by calling 608-241-2525.
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