Summer Solstice Festival 2026

June 19, 2026
Music as Poetry

Pēteris Vasks (b. 1946)
The Fruit of Silence (2013), arr. for Piano Quintet

Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks treats music as a form of spiritual poetry. He frequently sets to music verses by poets of his homeland such as Knuts Skujenieks and Imants Ziedonis, weaving singing, soaring melodies with themes of nature, human fragility, and resilience. Vasks’ approach to musical poetry is rooted in deeply evocative elements of nature as a metaphor for the moral world, direct lyricism, and slow-woven, atmospheric textures.

Vasks’ 2013 a capella choral work The Fruit of Silence has been praised for its hauntingly beautiful harmonies, slow atmospheric pacing, and ability to transport listeners into a state of profound peace and reflection. Originally based on a text by Mother Teresa, this work continues to be performed in various guises, including this quintet for piano and strings. The success of the piece across different iterations speaks to its emotional accessibility and appeal.

Robert Schumann (1810–1856)
Fantasiestücke, op. 73 for Cello and Piano (1849)

Schumann’s Fantasiestücke (“Fantasy Pieces”), composed over the course of just two days, are remarkable for their imagination and Romantic expression. Though compact, each piece makes a terse, economic artistic statement. The brooding melancholic quality of the first piece contrasts with a conversational middle movement that features playful back-and-forth passages before coming to a peaceful rest. An energetic final movement closes out the work in a flurry of sweeping Romantic exuberance.

Paul Wiancko (b. 1983)
American Haiku (2014)

Acclaimed composer and Kronos Quartet cellist Paul Wiancko is an eclectic creative voice in contemporary art music. His three-movement American Haiku is a breezy work which nods to diverse inspirations ranging from Appalachian fiddling and Japanese folk music to the dramatic and expansive landscape of the United States. The work demands an agile and varied technique from the two string players (who are sometimes called on to play as percussionists), while also requiring a capacity for convincing introspection and emotional depth.

Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904)
Piano Quartet No. 1 in D Major, op. 23 (1875)

Opening quietly with an airy melody first murmured in the cello before being expounded on by the other players, Dvořák’s sunny first piano quartet already bears the hallmarks of his mature sound: ear-hooking tunefulness and compelling rhythmic drive. The work’s first movement flows easily and energetically, suggesting the freshness of nature in the Bohemian countryside. A lilting andantino middle movement is sombre yet tender, a set of five variations on a melancholic theme skilfully wrung out for all its possibilities. Following this, a bubbly rondo movement centres around a genial recurrent theme that sandwiches contrasting developmental episodes of urgent dramatic tension into an otherwise bouncy and bright finale to this early work.

Program notes by Morgan Luethe

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June 20, 2026
Soirée Française

Lili Boulanger (1893–1918)
Deux Morceaux for Violin and Piano (1911–1914)

Lili Boulanger’s Deux Morceaux for Violin and Piano offers two short glimpses of the colourful invention and skill of a fledgling composer. Nocturne, composed shortly before her successful participation in the famed Prix de Rome competition, looks back to the early Russian musical inspirations of her older colleagues Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. Here stillness and warmth suggest nighttime, with a gentle, pondering accompaniment under a swooning melody that could just as easily have come from the pen of Borodin himself. The animated Cortège that follows is an athletic dialogue for the two players who exchange the thematic material and contrasting textures seamlessly in a minute-and-a-half of perpetual movement.

Henri Vieuxtemps (1820–1881)
Elegy in F Minor for Viola and Piano, op. 30 (1854?)

Vieuxtemps’ Élégie is a passionate single-movement fantasia that exploits the burnished, dark tones of the viola to couch contrasting moments of despair, tenderness, and desperation. Following a sombre, plodding opening, the music shifts to the relative major key and gloom gives way to more hopeful music set in the viola’s pleading upper register overtop a lieder accompaniment in the piano. The music becomes frenzied before relenting into an agitated recapitulation of the opening material in true Romantic fashion.

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921)
Cello Sonata in C Minor, op. 32 (1872)

Saint-Saëns’ fiery first cello sonata reveals his fundamentally classicist sensibilities both in the clarity of its architecture and in its lean instrumental textures. Like Mendelssohn, Saint-Saëns sought to balance emotional romanticism and poised restraint, careful always to shape the drama of his material to suit the classic musical forms he inherited. The ghost of Beethoven haunts the work’s stormy opening movement, its character clearly revealing Saint-Saëns’ familiarity with the older composer’s many chamber works also set in the key of C Minor. The central andante movement begins with a lilting choral melody against a limpid staccato bass accompaniment. The inner section of this lyrical movement swoons a little more before re-examining the opening motif, over a more florid, flowing accompaniment. The fierceness of the first movement returns in the finale which, after offering brief moments of respite, hurls the sonata to a tumultuous conclusion.

Jean Françaix (1912–1997)
String Trio (1933)

Charm and elegance are the animating forces behind Françaix’s tightly constructed trio for strings. Spread across four short movements, the work’s neoclassical inspiration is palpable, balancing a modern musical vocabulary with the clear textures of the French Baroque period. The opening allegretto is a frisky three-part conversation, with muted strings scurrying around bits of thematic material and occasional string-plucking adding to the chatter. After the lurching rhythmic drive of the boisterous, harmonically rich scherzo, the third-movement andante showcases Françaix’s exquisite melodic gift, as the players share a heartfelt meditation that counterbalances the buoyant wit of the preceding movements. With the concluding rondo, the trio returns to its rambunctious ways, romping to a pizzicato beat before ending with a final humorous surprise.

Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924)
Piano Quartet No. 2 in G Minor, op. 45 (1887)

Fauré’s strongest chamber music pieces are those featuring the piano. Written four years after its better-known sibling, the second piano quartet is still a child of the composer’s earlier period, somewhat similar in design and mood, but increasingly refined. The quartet opens with surging, shimmering energy as a striking modal melody is forcefully announced by the strings in unison above a roiling piano accompaniment. The movement roughly traces the sonata form with two contrasting themes, the first full of motion and steady force, the second much more serene and poetic. The following scherzo is a moto perpetuo anchored atop another motoric figuration in the piano, like the first movement, punctuated by plucking and stabbing strings surrounding a frantic melodic line that conjures a quicksilver urgency reminiscent of Mendelssohn’s famous scherzi.

The long and transcendent slow movement silences the bluster of the scherzo, opening on with a sparse yet intimate duo for piano and viola to create an atmosphere of spaciousness and poetic beauty. The musical texture gradually densifies as the movement gently unfurls in a hazy ebb. The serious character of the opening movement returns at the beginning of the finale, once again featuring an agitated piano ostinati underneath fierce unison strings. Brimming with robust passagework that demands stamina from the players, the finale maintains a frenetic character throughout as it vigorously barrels toward an ecstatic conclusion.

Program notes by Morgan Luethe

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June 22, 2026
Summer Passion

Jean-Baptiste Barrière (1707–1747)
Duo for Two Cellos in G Major (ca. 1737–40)

With a career spanning the high Baroque period, Barrière, initially as a viol player and then later as a virtuoso cellist as the instrument rose to prominence, was highly regarded throughout France during his lifetime. Eventually rising to achieve patronage in the court of Louis XV, Barrière enjoyed a successful period composing and publishing chamber works that established the cello as a staple of the string family. Though little-known today, Barrière’s works stand out for their penetrating sensitivity and musicality, balancing the decadence of the Baroque sensibility and formal procedure with deep emotional resonance.

Zoltán Kodály (1882–1967)
Intermezzo for String Trio (1905)

Kodály’s attractive intermezzo coincides with the composer’s embarkation on a serious pursuit, the collection and study of authentic Hungarian folk melodies with his colleague Béla Bartók. Narrated through its pleasantly inflected harmonic language and a gently varied range of musical textures, the piece reflects the young composer’s burgeoning interest in the folk music of his homeland and his expert integration of its elements into his own music.

Samuel Barber (1910–1981)
Sonata for Cello and Piano, op. 6 (1932)

Though a student work, completed at the end of Barber’s studies at the Curtis Institute, the cello sonata is an attractive work that announces the impressive young musical mind behind it. The mark of Romantic lyricism is unmistakeable in the opening movement which, after a brooding initial episode, casts its gaze back to the nineteenth century with one of the most yearning themes Johannes Brahms never wrote. The middle movements of the work are presented as an integrated single statement, with plaintive, inward-looking adagio sections bookending a short, angular presto passage characterized by skittering textures for both instruments. The finale unleashes a dire outcry from the piano. This soon gives way to a contrasting dialogue with the cello that turns introspective and witty as it moves along, flirting between the parallel major and minor keys as it works over the movement’s thematic material before coming to a decisive halt in despair.

Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847)
String Quartet No. 2 in A Minor, op. 13 (1827)

Though numbered second, the young Felix Mendelssohn’s String Quartet in A Minor is the first foray of his lifelong engagement with the genre. The piece’s master-craftsmanship, coupled with its lyricism and intensity, make it remarkable as the work of a seventeen-year-old. The quartet revolves around a theme from one of the composer’s earlier lieds, which makes literal appearances in both outer movements and haunts the character of the inner ones. Stated at the very opening of the work, this theme binds the movements cohesively as it noticeably influences other melodic material throughout the piece. The unity of the work is completed with a tender reappearance of the lied theme at the close of the finale.

The first movement, after moving past the serenity of its delicate opening, launches into a taut allegro propelled by strongly rhythmic thematic material. Short respite is offered at the genial opening of the following adagio, but this soon gives way to an austere fugal figure that sets the rest of the movement on a rhapsodic flight that peters out bit by bit. A slight, impish intermezzo movement is followed by highly agitated first bars that announce the finale. The music hurls along with Beethovenian momentum, offering glimpses of motifs heard earlier in the piece, until it culminates in the hushed closing bars, in which the tender, hymnlike lied theme that opened the quartet is again disclosed to us.

Program notes by Morgan Luethe