For whatever reason, the second half of the concert season always turns out to be especially busy for me. I don’t know if it’s the allure of the repertoire, the irresistible discount offers, or the madness of spring, but since the pandemic, anyway, every year, March and April have turned out to be crazy concert months. Surely the madness peaks at the end of April, when I will be hearing Yuja Wang and Yo-Yo Ma on the same day (!), but I’ll be running it close with a concert of rarely-heard music from the 1920s (including John Alden Carpenter’s “Skyscrapers”) at Lincoln Center with the American Symphony Orchestra this weekend and Jake Heggie’s “Moby Dick” at the Met later in the week.
Despite the fact that my dance card is full, I’ll definitely make room for this one, which totally snuck up on me: tomorrow night, Thursday, at 7:00, the BLACK OAK Ensemble will perform works for string trio at Trinity Church, 33 Mercer Street in Princeton, NJ.
The program is Classic Ross Amico catnip, including music by Gideon Klein, Jean Cras, and Henri Tomasi. Also some guy named Johann Sebastian Bach (to be played, as it turns out, on the eve of his birthday anniversary).
The Czech pianist and composer Gideon Klein (1919-1945) was one of a number of major musical figures to be interned at Terezin, or Theresienstadt, the model “artists’ camp” set up by the Nazis for propaganda purposes. Basically, it was an antechamber to Auschwitz. When there were no camera crews or Red Cross representatives to bear witness, Klein was deported and killed with the rest.
Jean Cras (1879-1932) was a career navy officer from Brittany, who composed a fair amount of his music shipboard. His opera, “Polyphème,” about the lovelorn cyclops Polyphemus, is a great wallow.
French composer Henri Tomasi (1901-1971) found steady work as a conductor, beginning in the early days of radio. In the 1940s, he established the contemporary music group Triton with Sergei Prokofiev, Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, and Francis Poulenc.
The program will conclude with some ersatz Romani music, Vittorio Monti’s “Csárdás” from 1904. (You know it, even if you think you don’t.)
The concert is the latest in a chamber music series featuring visiting ensembles presented by the Princeton Symphony Orchestra. If it lures me out on a Thursday evening during such a busy month, it’s got to be something special. For tickets, visit princetonsymphony.org.
To learn more about the Black Oak Ensemble, look here: https://www.blackoakensemble.com/about
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