Dear music lovers

Around the turn of the century, musical diversity flourished as never before — a wealth of different styles blossomed in these years. Mahler pushed expressionist Romanticism to new heights, while in another direction, Ravel — whose 150th birthday we celebrate this year — captured the shimmering beauty of Impressionism. Dvořák wove Czech folk music into his work, and Bartók, with his early Piano Quintet, was still steeped in Viennese High Romanticism, though already beginning to shape a language uniquely his own. Meanwhile, the Second Viennese School began to stir, with Alban Berg’s early atonal clarinet miniatures offering a glimpse of bold, unfamiliar territory. Even the tango of the Guardia Vieja was born in this remarkable period — all within the space of just twenty years.

But turning points don’t only mark entire eras; they unfold within individual works as well. The transition from Classical to Romantic can be felt in Beethoven’s early pieces: An die ferne Geliebte (the very first song cycle), his String Quintet Op. 29, Piano Sonata Op. 13 Pathétique, and Seven Variations on Bei Männern, welche Liebe fühlen.

There are turning points in love and in song, too — in Hugo Wolf’s Italian Songbook, with its playful and tender dialogue between “him” and “her,” sighing, pleading, and quarreling with delightful abandon, and in the beautiful, intimate duets of Robert Schumann.

And throughout these three days, we’ll encounter music that evokes magical turns of fate, the whipping circles of a whirlwind, the ticking of a turning clockwork, or the ultimate turning point — death itself — in Schubert’s Schwanengesang, Bartók’s Elegy, and Maxim Kolomiiets’ Echoes of Drowning Reflections.