Events presented by The Academy, Boulder Bach and Boulder Chamber Orchestra
By Peter Alexander Oct. 16 at 10:33 a.m.
The Academy, University Hill will present pianist Eugene Gaub and violinist Nancy McFarland Gaub performing in their Chapel Hall Friday evening (7 p.m. Oct. 18; details below).
Their performance of works by Beethoven and César Franck will be free, but audience members are asked to RSVP in advance. Eugene Gaub will perform Beethoven’s late Piano Sonata No. 28 in A major op. 101, and together they will perform Franck’s Sonata in A major for violin and piano.
Eugene Gaub is emeritus professor of music at Grinnell College in Iowa, where he taught music theory and courses in music history from 1995 to 2022. A graduate of the Juilliard School, he holds a doctorate and performer’s certificate from the Eastman School of Music.
Throughout her career, violinist and composer Nancy McFarland Gaub has performed as a soloist, chamber and orchestral musician in the U.S., Europe and Africa. She also was an artist-in-residence and taught violin and chamber music at Grinnell College for 25 years.
Composed in 1816, Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 28 is considered the beginning of his third and final period of composition. The composer himself called the sonata “a series of impressions and reveries.” When he wrote the sonata he was almost totally deaf, only able to communicate with friends through the notebooks that he kept for the remainder of his life. This isolation may be the reason that, like the other late sonatas, No. 28 creates a sense of intimacy.
Franck wrote his Violin Sonata in 1886 as a wedding gift for the violinist Eugène Ysaÿe. The public premiere of the sonata, given by Ysaÿe with the pianist Marie-Léontine Bordes-Pène has become something of a legend. It was the last piece on a long program given at the Museum of Modern Painting in Brussels. By the time the performers started the Sonata, it was already dusk, but the museum did not allow artificial light. Ysaÿe and Bordes-Pène had to complete the performance from memory in the darkened room.
From that auspicious beginning, the Sonata has become one of the most revered sonatas for violin and piano, and one of Franck’s best known works.
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Eugene Gaub, piano, and Nancy McFarland Gaub, violin
- Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 28 in A major, op. 101
- César Franck: Sonata in A major for violin and piano
7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 18
Chapel Hall, The Academy University Hill, Boulder
Free; RSVP HERE
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The Boulder Bach Festival will present its COmpass REsonance (CORE) ensemble and guest artists in a program of music by relatively little known Baroque composers Saturday at the Dairy Arts Center (4 p.m. Oct. 19 in the Gordon Gamm Theater; details below).
Featured artists will be the festival’s director, violinist Zachary Carrettin and 10-string guitarist Keith Barnhart, a member of the CORE ensemble. They will be joined by Chris Holman, harpsichord; Joseph Howe, cello; and guest artist soprano Mara Riley.
With little known composers, the program provides an opportunity to explore an intriguing and idiosyncratic segment of music history. The performers will play and sing music of the early Baroque period, in a style known as the stile moderno (modern style) that represented a striking departure from the music of the late Renaissance.
Many of the composers included on the program were themselves virtuoso performers, and their works expanded the possibilities of both instrumental and vocal music. The composers on the program are Alessandro Stradella, Nicola Matteis, Marco Uccellini, Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, Giuseppi Maria Jacchini, Silvia Leopold Weiss and Tarquinio Merula.
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“Passion and Poetry“
Boulder Bach Festival CORE Ensemble, Zachary Carrettin, music director/violinist
With Keith Barnhart, 10-string guitar; Chris Holman, harpsichord; Joseph Howe, cello; and Mara Riley, soprano
- Works by Alessandro Stradella, Nicola Matteis, Marco Uccellini, Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, Giuseppi Maria Jacchini, Silvia’s Leopold Weiss and Tarquinio Merula
4 p.m. Saturday, October 19
Gordon Gamm Theater, Dairy Arts Center
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Boulder Chamber Orchestra’s Mini-Chamber I, their first concert of chamber music for the 2024–25 season, will feature music by Beethoven, British composer Frank Bridge, and French composer Lili Boulanger Saturday (7:30 p.m. Oct. 19 at the Boulder Adventist Church; details below).
The program is the first in a series of four Mini-Chamber performances that will be presented by the Boulder Chamber Orchestra (BCO). Three of the performances, including Oct. 19, will feature the BCO’s artist in residence for the current season, pianist Jennifer Hayghe. For the first program she will be joined by orchestra members Sarah Whitnah, violin, and Andrew Brown, cello, for a program of music for piano trio.
English composer Frank Bridge is remembered today mostly as the teacher of Benjamin Britten, who honored the older composer with his “Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge” for strings. Bridge wrote three sets of miniatures for piano trio, from which Hayghe has chosen four pieces for this program. They were written for one of Bridge’s violin students, but critics have suggested that they are too sophisticated to be considered “student works.”
The younger sister of the music teacher Nadia Boulanger, Lili died at the tragically young age of 24. The first female winner of the Prix de Rome composition prize, Lili showed precocious musical talent as young as four, when she accompanied her older sister to classes at the Paris Conservatoire. Her music has recently become better known.
Written in 1918, D’un matin de printemps (Of a spring morning) was one of the last works she completed. It was written in versions for solo violin, flute, and piano, for piano trio, and for orchestra.
One of the most tuneful and frequently performed of Beethoven’s works, the Piano Trio Op. 97 is known as the “Archduke Trio.” It was dedicated to Archduke Rudolph of Austria, later the Archbishop of Olomouc (Olmütz) and a Catholic Cardinal. An amateur pianist, Rudolph was a patron and composition student of Beethoven, who dedicated several major works to him, including his Piano Concerto No. 5 (“Emperor”) and the Missa Solemnis.
The Trio was composed 1810–11, toward the end of Beethoven’s so-called “heroic” middle period of compositions. Written at a time when the composer was in unusually good spirits, the Trio has none of the angst or fierce drive of his Fifth Symphony and other music we associate with the more rebellious aspect of his character. It is composed in a traditional but expansive four-movement sonata form.
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Mini-Chamber I
Jennifer Hayghe, piano, with members of the BCO
- Frank Bridge: Miniatures for Piano Trio, Nos. III–IV–V–VIII
- Lili Boulanger: D’un matin de printemps (Of a spring morning)
- Beethoven: Piano Trio in B-flat major, op. 97 (“Archduke”)
7:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 19
Boulder Adventist Church
Sharps & Flatirons 