A French Musical Event

On Saturday evening, February 23 at 8pm, the Montante Cultural Center of Canisius College, located at 2001 Main Street, will be the venue for a concert billed as “A French Musical Event.” Jointly sponsored by the Alliance Francaise de Buffalo, the Canisius College Department of Modern Languages and the Federation of Alliances Francaises, USA, the concert will feature a performance by Le Quatuor de Chartres along with a special guest artist, singer and saxophonist Philippe Duchesne.

Le Quatuor de Chartres has enjoyed a very successful European career since its founding in 1985, and has recorded many of the standard works in the string quartet repertoire. Since 1995, the quartet has also enjoyed a fruitful relationship with the Yared Music School of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. This Saturday evening, the French singer Philippe Duchesne, who is also a member of the Paris Saxophone Quartet and who has performed with the Grand Orchestre du Splendid and jazz stars such as Dee Dee Bridgewater, will join with the members of Le Quatuor de Chartres in a collaboration that has been praised for revealing a subtle alchemy between voices, poetry and melody. Duchesne will join quartet members Patrice Legrand, Robert Aribaud, Marc-Antoine Chomet and Philippe Pennanguer in an event that includes songs and instrumental music with bossa nova, rock, ballads and jazz rhythms.

Tickets at the door are $22 for the general public, $20 AFB members/seniors and $15 students. Call 886-0886 for more information.

Musicians From Marlboro

On Tuesday, February 26 at 8pm, the Musicians From Marlboro make a welcome return to the Mary Seaton Room of Kleinhans Music Hall for a concert in the Buffalo Chamber Music Society’s series. The Musicians From Marlboro is the touring extension of the Marlboro Music Festival, founded in 1951 by the legendary pianist Rudolf Serkin and his friends at a small college in rural Vermont. For two months each summer young professional musicians join with distinguished senior artists to explore the vast repertoire of chamber music in an intimate, informal setting. The tour groups are usually built around works performed the previous summer that the festival’s artistic directors, Richard Goode and Mitsuko Uchida, phenomenal musicians in their own right, felt were so special that they should be shared with audiences around the country.

Following five days of intensive rehearsal, the touring groups perform five or six concerts in a short time span. The concerts offer the young participating artists invaluable touring experience and exposure at the start of their careers, giving them a chance to put into practice what they have gained from their summers in Vermont. Audiences get to hear the mostly young artists, still at the beginning of their careers, performing unusual chamber music repertoire at a high artistic level. Since their inception, the tours have introduced such artists as Jaimie Laredo, Murray Perahia, Paula Robison and Richard Stoltzman and boasted the careers of the members of the Emerson, Guarneri, Julliard and Tokyo Quartets, among others.

The artists on Tuesdays program include Lily Francis and Yura Lee, violin, Eric Nowlin, viola, Marcy Rosen, cello, Ieva Jokubaviciute, piano, and mezzo-soprano Tamara Mumford. Some Buffalo concertgoers will no doubt remember Yura Lee, who gave a lively performance of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with the BPO under the baton of JoAnn Falletta in 2005. Also, anyone who attended the Met simulcast of Puccini’s opera Manon Lescaut at the Regal Cineplex last Saturday saw mezzo-soprano Tamara Mumford singing the role of the Musician in her Metropolitan Opera debut.

Tamara Mumford will sing selections from Beethoven’s folk song arrangements of Irish, Welsh and Scottish songs for voice, violin, cello and piano. Beethoven made the arrangements due to the efforts of a Scotsman named George Thomson (1757-1851), and to the surprise of many, they constitute the largest body of work by the composer. Thomson was an earnest reviver of ancient Scottish melodies and he employed the foremost composers of the era, including Haydn and Pleyel as well Beethoven, to further his aims. After much negotiation, Beethoven agreed to accept the commission—at the right price. Beethoven wrote Thomson that “I will also be glad to fulfill your wish to harmonize the little Scottish airs; and in this matter I await a more definite proposal, since it is well known to me that Mr. Haydn was paid one pound sterling for each song,” putting the price of his own efforts on a par, deservedly, with that of his old master.

Beethoven composed the arrangements based on the bare melodies of the songs, and his distinct musical voice is best heard in the short instrumental introduction and postlude to each song. The publisher intended them to be performed in the home, but the difficult piano parts were beyond the abilities of most of the intended audience and they sold poorly. Yet Thomson was impressed by the arrangements, observing, perhaps not without regret, that Beethoven “composes for posterity.”

Mumford will also be the vocalist in Brahms’ warm, much loved late work Zwei Gesange, Op. 91 for mezzo, viola and piano.

Obviously not afraid of a challenge, the string players will perform the 1927 Bartok String Quartet No. 4. The five-movement quartet employs an arch form, with the first and fifth movements being thematically related, as are the second and fourth movements, while the middle third movement stands alone. Bartok uses extended instrumental techniques in the work. All four instruments play with mutes during the second movement, while the entire fourth movement is played pizzicato, and in the third movement, held notes are sometimes indicated as to be played without vibrato. The result is a work that can be enjoyed both viscerally at a first hearing, and then intellectually on repeated hearings. Mozart’s String Quintet in D Major, K. 593 is the final work on the program. From the brief, repeated opening notes of the cello arpeggio and the answering legato melodies from the rest of the strings in the first movement, to the elaborate fugue just before the end of the final movement, Mozart’s ability to weave a seamless, charming web of beautiful sound is always fully evident in this delightful work.

A “Chat with the Artists” with WNED-FM afternoon host Peter Hall at 7:15pm precedes the concert. Tickets are $20 for general admission and $10 for students. For tickets, call 462-4939 or purchase online at bflochambermusic.org.

UB Symphony Orchestra

On Wednesday, February 27 at 8pm, conductor Christian Baldini leads the UB Symphony Orchestra in a program that includes Verdi’s Nabucco Overture, the Haydn Cello Concerto in C and Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 5 (Reformation). Baldini has rapidly proven to be a strong addition, both to the UB Music Department and to the classical musical scene in Buffalo. A couple of weeks ago, Baldini lead an excitingly taut performance of Stravinsky’s rhythmically challenging L’Histoire du Soldat during A Musical Feast concert at the Kavinoky Theatre. Conducting the UB Symphony Orchestra offers its own challenges, with many of the orchestra members being students majoring in subjects other than music. The rare opportunity to hear UB music faculty member Jonathan Golove play a standard repertoire concerto piece—he’s the soloist in the Haydn concerto—is reason enough to attend the event. As a member of the Baird Trio, along with virtuoso violinist Movses Pogossian and pianist Stephen Manes, both of whom moved to California over the summer, Golove’s rock solid cello playing has anchored many memorable performances.

Lippes Concert Hall in Slee Hall, UB North Campus. Admission is free.