Musically Speaking

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 [...]

BCMS Season 27 concludes with performances of three works that have not been heard before on our series: Haydn’s so-called “Quinten” or ‘Fifths’ String Quartet, Duo for Violin and Viola by Heitor Villa-Lobos and Concerto for Violin, Piano and String Quartet of Ernest Chausson.
The presence of the Haydn allows us finally to invoke the name [...]

Julius Röntgen (1855-1932) is the unfamiliar name in the middle of our April program. Until a few years ago his name and music were completely unknown to me. My first encounter was while seated in the balcony at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam awaiting the start of what was to be a really splendid concert performed [...]

The second concert of our twenty-seventh season offers music that in at least three different ways brings the outside, or the outsider, in.
Chamber music began as one of the domestic, interior arts within the family, the church, or the court. The best known of the evening’s three works, Johannes Brahms’ Trio for Violin, Horn and [...]

Our first concert of the new BCMS season begins where chamber music itself began, with music written for private enjoyment by the smallest number of players of different instruments from the same family. More than any other ensemble the string trio, as created and perfected by Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, places the viola in an [...]