At a time when gathering for live concerts is still a risky proposition, Lenape Chamber Ensemble is offering archival performances from last year’s Summer Gala series. Listen online for music by Mendelssohn, Saint-Saëns, and Beethoven (recorded 7/13/19), Haydn, Milhaud, and Dvořák (recorded 7/20/19), and Cherubini, Ravel, and Taneyev (recorded 7/27/19).
The Lenape Chamber Ensemble was founded in 1975 by Mary Eleanor Pitcairn, as Bucks County’s resident chamber music ensemble. A summer season was added in 1986.
Ordinarily, performances would take place on Friday evenings, at Upper Tinicum Lutheran Church, in Upper Black Eddy, PA, and Sunday afternoons, at Delaware Valley University, in Doylestown. Needless to say, nothing about this year is ordinary.
Thankfully, the internet is immune to COVID. Enjoy selections from the 33rd annual Summer Gala concerts, and keep up to date with plans for Lenape’s 46th regular season here:
We’ll put the early spring into our step, this afternoon on The Classical Network, and enliven your Friday with a program in 4/4 time.
An all-march afternoon? That’s the fact, Jack!
Marches for band. Symphonic marches. Light music marches. Marches for piano. Marches for string quartet. Funeral marches. Coronation marches. Circus marches.
Fear not, it won’t be all march-or-die, an incessant barrage of three-minute quick marches in 4/4 time. Some of the marches will be embedded in larger works. Some of the works will merely suggest marches.
There will be plenty of time for you to do your warm-ups, during today’s Noontime Concert, as Lenape Chamber Ensemble will perform works by Beethoven (the String Quartet, Op. 18, No. 4), Charles Ives (the Violin Sonata No. 2), and Camille Saint-Saëns (the Piano Trio No. 2).
The next Lenape program will take place this weekend, presented on two concerts, tonight at 8:15 p.m. at Upper Tinicum Lutheran Church in Upper Black Eddy, PA, and Sunday at 3 p.m. at Delaware Valley University in Doylestown. Lenape musicians will perform Franz Schubert’s “Rosamunde” Quartet, Carl Reinecke’s “Undine” Sonata,” and Gabriel Fauré’s Piano Quartet in C minor. For more information, look online at http://www.lenapechamberensemble.org.
Then join me for Beethoven, Ives, and Saint-Saëns, followed by an afternoon of March madness, this Friday from 12 to 6 p.m. EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
It’s easy to be seduced by a platitude of one’s own creation, especially when it also happens to double as a bon mot. Cassius must have been rather puffed up at his own cleverness when he observed, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” Yet just because something sounds good or has the ring of truth doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s so.
When you join me for today’s Noontime Concert on The Classical Network, you will learn that the impetus for the creation of both Jean Sibelius’ Sonatina for Violin and Piano, Op. 80, and Beethoven’s “Razumovsky” Quartet, Op. 59, No. 2, lay at least in part in their composers’ fascination with the heavens.
Though Sibelius was enthralled by the violin from an early age – he even entertained thoughts for a time of becoming a concert virtuoso – he was 50 years-old by the time he composed his sonatina in 1915. According to an entry in his diary, his nights were filled with dreams of his childhood and his youthful ambitions to become a world-class violinist. He notes that these childhood memories were very much tied up with “the sky of my childhood and stars… lots of stars.”
If we’re to believe Beethoven pupil Carl Czerny, stars are also at the heart of Beethoven’s quartet of 1806. Allegedly, the composer was inspired to write the slow movement while contemplating the heavens.
If stars had any influence over neglected Czech composer Zdenek Fibich, it was in the form of star-crossed love, at least for a time. Fibich’s wife died in childbirth when he was in his early 20s. He then married her sister, and though the union lasted for 20 years, he ultimately found true happiness only with a former student, who became the inspiration for many of his mature works. Fibich’s Piano Quintet in D major, Op. 42, of 1893 actually dates from the waning years of his second marriage.
Fibich was also star-crossed in that he failed to embrace the Czech nationalism of his older contemporaries, especially Antonin Dvořák, and it is probably for this reason more than any other that his music tends not to be remembered. I think you’ll be very pleased to make the acquaintance of Fibich’s quintet. The work exists in two versions: the more frequently encountered instrumentation for piano and strings, and the version we’ll hear this afternoon for the striking combination of piano, violin, clarinet, horn, and cello.
The heavenly performances will be by superstars of the Lenape Chamber Ensemble: violinists Cyrus Beroukhim and Emily Daggett Smith, violist Catherine Beeson, cellist Arash Amini, clarinetist Alan R. Kay, hornist David Jolley, and pianist Marcantonio Barone. To learn more about this Bucks County-based institution (established by Mary Pitcairn in 1975), visit Lenape’s website, at lenapechamberensemble.org.
There will be plenty of time – and of course space – for more stellar music following today’s Noontime Concert broadcast. We’ll probe a galaxy of cosmic selections, from 12 to 4 p.m. EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
The centerpiece of today’s Noontime Concert on The Classical Network will be a chamber music rarity by the great Spanish cellist Gaspar Cassadó (1897-1966). Cassadó had the advantage of having been born into a musical household in Barcelona. His father, a composer, organist, and piano salesman, shepherded his development and even moved the family to Paris so that he and his elder brother, Augustin, a violinist, could take advantage of the artistic climate there.
At the age of nine, Cassadó was heard in recital by Pablo Casals, and though Casals was at the height of his career and very much in demand, he took the boy on as one of only three pupils. Needless to say, Casals’ influence made a deep impression on the young cellist. Cassadó also studied composition with Maurice Ravel and Manuel de Falla.
Like the violinist Fritz Kreisler, Cassadó remained sheepish about some of his original miniatures in the styles of other composers and gained a degree of notoriety when it was discovered that many of the works he had been attributing to others, such as Frescobaldi, Boccherini, and Schubert, were in fact his own.
Casals performed and conducted a number of Cassadó’s acknowledged works, and teacher and student often appeared together in concert. However, with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Casals fled the country, effectively abandoning his career, while Cassadó chose to continue to perform extensively. Though Cassadó stayed out of Spain until after World War II and performed only once in fascist Germany, Casals publicly disavowed him in a letter to the New York Times. It’s thought that this irreparably damaged Cassadó’s career, though the two cellists later reconciled.
Among Cassadó’s most frequently performed works are his “Rapsodia Catalana,” his Suite for Solo Cello, and “Requiebros,” which was championed by Casals.
We will hear Cassadó’s Piano Trio in C major, performed by artists of the Lenape Chamber Ensemble, from a concert given at Delaware Valley University on July 22. Also on the program is Mozart’s Horn Quintet in E-flat major and Tchaikovsky’s string sextet, “Souvenir de Florence.”
The Lenape Chamber Ensemble is made up of hornist David Jolley, violinists Nancy Bean and Cyrus Beroukhim, violists Catherine Beeson and Brett Deubner, cellist Arash Amini, and pianist Marcantonio Barone.
The ensemble’s next concerts – featuring works by Haydn, Poulenc, and Schubert – will take place at 8:15 p.m. on March 2 at Upper Tinicum Lutheran Church, 188 Upper Tinicum Church Road, in Upper Black Eddy, PA, and at 3 p.m. on March 4 at Delaware Valley University’s Life Sciences Auditorium, 700 E. Butler Street and Route 611, in Doylestown. To learn more, visit lenapechamberensemble.org.
For today, I hope you’ll join me for music by Mozart, Cassadó, and Tchaikovsky, at 12:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
With all the salutes to Sir Neville Marriner, who died on Sunday at the age of 92, it’s easy to overlook the fact that yesterday was the 93rd birthday of conductor and composer Stanislaw Skrowaczewski. Interestingly, both Methuselahian maestros served as one-time music directors of the Minnesota Orchestra – as powerful an argument as any for the health benefits of fried food on a stick. Join me this afternoon, as we honor Skrowaczewski with his recordings of Bruckner and Ravel.
First, it will be another Noontime Concert with the Lenape Chamber Ensemble. The program, which was presented on July 23rd at Delaware Valley College in Doylestown, Pa., will feature a string trio by Beethoven, the Violin Sonata by Francis Poulenc, and a rarely-heard piano sextet by a 15 year-old Felix Mendelssohn. The Lenape Chamber Ensemble is made up of crackerjack musicians from Philadelphia and New York. You can find out more about the group and its upcoming concerts, the next of which will take place this weekend, at lenapechamberensemble.org.
Tune in today from noon to 4 p.m. EDT. The musical selections will range from chamber works to Bruckner, on WWFM – The Classical Network and at wwfm.org.
