Tag: Raritan River Music

Somewhere between the return of Catbird and the reopening of the public pool comes the 37th Raritan River Music Festival. The festival, curated by Laura Oltman and Michael Newman of the Newman & Oltman Guitar Duo, gets a jump on the festival-heavy summer months with a series of May programs that honor, in one way or another, the 250th anniversary of the founding of our nation. These will be presented over four concerts in historic venues located in New Jersey’s Hunterdon and Warren Counties.

Since it’s been a very busy week – chockful of everything except sleep, apparently – and I’m running on fumes right now, I’m going to turn it over to this encapsulation from the Raritan River Music website:

“This season RRM celebrates the 250th anniversary of the founding of our nation. Many of our festival venues pre-date the American Revolution. The congregations of our churches were founded by people who were among the first European settlers in North America.

“So far from anything they had ever known, they fashioned a government and a culture separate from their origins, whose modern global appeal surely derives from the multiplicity of those who created it. A core mission of Raritan River Music is to embrace the creation and performance of new music from the New World and to build a recorded archive of these musical compositions – music that is as original, dynamic, and aspirational as our nation.”

Now back to me:

Duo Jalal will return to the festival with works for the striking (and bowed) combination of viola and percussion. The program, “Threads of Sound: Voices of American Composers,” will consist of new music by Kenji Bunch, Caroline Shaw, Dafnis Prieto, Kurt Rhode, and Dawn Avery. The concert will be performed at Historic Hunterdon County Court House, 71 Main St., in Flemington, on May 2 at 7:30 p.m.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Caroline Shaw’s music will also be represented on a concert by Trio Ondata, alongside works by Shostakovich, Haydn, and Chicago-born composer of Indian and Western classical music Reena Esmail. “American Mycelium: Explorations of the New World” will take place at Old Greenwich Presbyterian Church, 17 Greenwich Church Rd., in Stewartsville, on May 9 at 7:30 p.m.

Newman & Oltman will bring the “Greatest Hits of 1776,” as works by Haydn, Rossini, and Yankee tunesmith William Billings share a program with Early American-related works by Gaspare Spontini, Fernando Sor, and Stephen Jenks, along with an RRM commission, “Raritan Triptych,” by another Pulitzer Prize-winner, Paul Moravec. The concert will be held at Bethlehem Presbyterian Church, 2 Race St., in Pittstown, on May 16 at 7:30 p.m.

The series will conclude with “Two by Two: Harpsichord Duets Across the Centuries” – music performed on two harpsichords by ARTEK, Gwendolyn Toth and Peter Sykes, with an emphasis on composers for the virginal, clavichord, harpsichord, and chamber organ in the late 1500s/early 1600s, the peak period of English exploration of the New World. The program will be given at Stanton Reformed Church, 1 Stanton Mountain Rd., in Stanton, on May 23 at 7:30 p.m.

Concerts will also be available for streaming.

Stick a feather in your cap, call it macaroni, and visit https://www.raritanrivermusic.org/!