Musically Speaking

Each January since 2010 we have had the privilege of exploring topics in forum and concert that expand the contexts in which we appreciate the great chamber music literature. With support from MIT Music and Theater Arts Faculty and the Goethe-Institut Boston we place this season’s concert and forum squarely into the center of the [...]

Our December concert is comprised of familiar pieces built on memorable themes and many curious and wonderful connections.
Two of our composers, Bach and Handel, were revered by everybody’s ‘composer of the month,’ Ludwig van Beethoven. (He turns 241 on December 16!) Beethoven came to the attention of Viennese audiences and musicians with his superb [...]

The second program of our 29th season reminds me of many different beginnings in my own life: Haydn, as the “father of chamber music”, the Dohnányi Serenade as one I first performed on many tours in a trio with the man who was to become founder of BCMS, Ronald Thomas; the Bloch Two Pieces–first heard [...]

Our first program of the twenty-ninth BCMS season is full of unusual juxtapositions of youth and age.
Mozart’s Piano Trio in B-flat major, written in 1786, is the mature work of a young composer whose life was to end much too soon in 1791.
The Four Poems for low voice, viola and Piano by [...]

Dear Friends:
It is hard to contain the excitement we feel about the music we’ll hear, the artists we’ll experience and the ideas we’ll explore throughout the rest of the season. Our mission, to present insightful performances of the finest chamber music by many of today’s most exciting players, continues with a balance of the [...]

Our April concert can probably be distinguished by its containment of ‘all manner of plucked things;’ that is, the use of the plucked sound, explicitly and implicitly, as a source of the character and variety in the music. (And–for that matter–this music contains all manner of variation, too!) 
Mozart’s first of three quartets for flute and [...]

Our March concert provides a rare opportunity to invoke the Spiritus Hungaricus–that pungent ethnic spice that enlivened and informed so much of the formal classical music from Haydn to Brahms by occasionally allowing the rowdies into the salon.
We, however, allow the tables to be turned by presenting works by two recent and leading Hungarian [...]

In January 2010, our first BCMS Winter Festival and Forum Series presented jointly with the MIT Music and Theater Arts Faculty explored a segment of the chamber music repertoire through the lens of ideas about Musical Time–within the music, accompanying texts, and other artistic media.
Our 2011 BCMS Winter Special Event, also jointly presented by the [...]

We open the second concert of our fall series at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre by concluding the observance of Frederic Chopin’s 200th birthday begun this summer at the Mosesian Theater at the Arsenal Center in Watertown. In that series we heard Chopin’s early piano trio, two ballades, and his Op. 3 for cello and piano, Introduction [...]

Season twenty-eight begins in a burst of virtuosity not unlike the way we ended last season and continues with more firsts and rarities with which we are augmenting our offerings. Each of the pieces on this opening program is new to our subscription series repertoire.
We will have more to say in future postings about the [...]