The notable Avalon String Quartet returns with another Berkshire premiere, “For Such a Time as This,” a retelling of the biblical Esther story for string quartet and vocalist, from a feminist perspective. Composer Stacy Garrop’s (recent commissions from the Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Louisiana symphony orchestras) intent is to remind us “we each possess agency […]
In his dance suites, J. S. Bach ventures into Spanish sarabandes, French bourrées and British gigues. He and family members delighted in arranging Celtic and Scottish folk music. They will be joined by Beethoven and Haydn, who also forayed into Irish folk music with their own arrangements. Makaris formed in 2018 to explore the broad […]
The Romans appropriated the entirety of classical Greek culture, and the Renaissance rediscovered and revitalized it. Then came Rodin and Greek Revival in American architectural style. An Egyptomania craze gripped 19th century Europe and found its way into operas (Aida, Samson and Delilah), couture (harem pants as high fashion), architectural idioms, decorative arts, music and […]
Celebrate the Salon in the Gilded Age elegance at a private Berkshires club. The scintillating atmosphere of the 19th century institution that helped promote artists, painters and musicians as the intelligentsia gathered to exchange ideas, enhanced by gaiety and ambience. Savor a superb lunch and support Close Encounters With Music. La vie est belle! Reserve […]
The imperial “City of Song” has played an essential role as a leading European cultural center, hosting major personalities in the development of music, as well as literature, painting, psychiatry and intellectual thought, from the 16th to 20th centuries. As in the architecture, musical styles that sprang up are a mix of Baroque, Classical, Art […]
Dvořák’s sublime Piano Quintet in A Major occupies a lofty place in the chamber music canon, at the same elevation as Brahms’s Piano Quintet in F minor, op. 34. Simply put, both works are majestic, symphonic in scope, and invite the listener into a lost world of powerful beauty, profundity, and nobility of sentiments, peppered […]
