Yellow Barn Concerts to Include Tribute to Eva Mondon

YELLOW BARN PHOTO
PUTNEY — Yellow Barn’s summer festival continues this with three evening concerts and a morning masterclass with violinist Donald Weilerstein. The week will also include a tribute to Eva Mondon, who died Friday, with a free community concert Thursday.

Thursday

Thursday’s program will explore the relationship between earth and the heavens, “demonstrating that everything that we imagine and create begins with something that is already present in the natural world” said Artistic Director Seth Knopp.

The performance will open with Italian composer Franco Donatoni’s composition “Lumen” for piccolo, clarinet, celeste, vibraphone, viola and cello. Followed by Kaija Saariaho’s “New Gates,” and Georges Lentz’ “Caeli Enarrant (The Heavens Tell) IV.”

Australia-based composer Lentz has said that the “Caeli Enarrant” cycle reflects his “fascination with astronomy” and “attempts to express [his] spiritual beliefs, questions and doubts”.

After intermission, the concert will continue with “Les eaux” from Thomas Adès’ “Lieux retrouvés”, written in for cellist Steven Isserlis, who has said that Adès “takes influences from everywhere — from Offenbach, from jazz, from the French baroque, even from minimalism — and creates his own individual language within this one composition.”

Thursday’s concert will end with a succession of pieces by composers Gérard Grisey, Lei Liang, Rebecca Saunders, and Hans Abrahamsen. The succession includes a set of five works by Liang which explores the heavens, the earth, and the ways in which the imagination is but an extension of the natural world.

Thursday night’s concert is offered in memory of Mondon, a pillar of the Putney community for more than 50 years, and inspiring audience member since the first days of Yellow Barn.

“Eva embodied the spirit of Yellow Barn, listening acutely and then challenging us to make connections, to take care of others, wherever and whenever possible,” said Yellow Barn Executive Director Catherine Stephan.

“A ‘should’ from Eva invariably became ‘would’ as she was a master of the craft she taught, in ways remarkably similar to our musicians’ process,” she said.

Friday

Friday night’s concert will begin with Hungarian avant-garde composer György Ligeti’s “Musica Ricercata,” followed without a break by Girolamo Frescobaldi’s “Capriccio cromatico con ligature al contrario.”

Performed by eight different Yellow Barn pianists, “Musica Ricercata” represents Ligeti’s attempt to reinvent his musical language and is made up of eleven short movements, the last of which is an homage to Frescobaldi’s unique treatment of chromaticism.

After intermission, the concert will conclude with the first performance of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” on the Big Barn stage. Yellow Barn’s take on the piece includes an alternating piano and string trio instrumentation and features cellist Natasha Brofsky.

Saturday

On Saturday morning, violinist Donald Weilerstein leads a masterclass at 10:30 a.m. in the Big Barn, one of each season’s most popular events.

That evening, Week two of the 2023 Summer Festival will end with a full concert program including works by Alexander von Zemlinsky, Pavel Haas, Gérard Griser, Stefan Wolpe, Thierry Tidrow, Pascal Dusapin, Gérard Pesson and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

The program will begin and end with works by Zemlinsky (featuring violinist Curtis Macomber and French horn player Stephen Stirling); The first, a rare performance of the only two remaining movements of his String Quintet in D minor, the last, a staging of his “Waldgespräch (A Forest Dialogue).”

In Stepfan Wolpe’s “Anna Blune von Kurt Schwitters,” the audience will experience the work of a composer who, in 1951, described his music-making process as “a thoroughly proud, erect, hymnic, profoundly contained, human evocation.”

In Dusapin’s “Two Walking,” two Yellow Barn sopranos will make vivid a text by Gertrude Stein.

The program will also include Mozart’s Sonata for Piano and Violin in G Major and his Minuet in D Major alongside Gérard Pesson’s 2008 “Version glissée” transformation of the same Minuet. About his series of Mozart transformations, Pesson has said, “No trace of irreverence…but quite the opposite, a deep fondness for this music that is so intertwined with the fabric of our lives.”

Concerts are generally two and a half hours in length and including intermission.

All events take place in the Big Barn on Main Street in Putney. Tickets can be purchased online at www.yellowbarn.org, or by calling Yellow Barn at 802-387-6637.