Content area
Full text
The Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival offerings for August 2-8 include three world premieres, a program of Baroque guitar concertos, a song recital by mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton, a quintet for clarinet and strings by film composer Bernard Herrmann, and Gustav Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde.
SPOTLIGHT EVENT
In 1907, Gustav Mahler's eldest daughter died, he was diagnosed with a congenital heart defect, and he was forced to resign from the directorship of the Vienna Court Opera due to antisemitism. His musical response was Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), a hybrid of song cycle and symphony set to German translations of classic Chinese poems.
The six songs feature a mezzo-soprano and tenor in alternation, and their subject matter includes meditations on youth, beauty, and the transience of life. Mahler completed the work in 1909 but died in May 1911, six months before its premiere.
Das Lied von der Erde is now considered one of his surpassingly beautiful and personal works. The performances here will use a chamber-orchestra version for 14 players that was begun by Arnold Schoenberg and completed by Rainer Riehn. The conductor is Donald Runnicles, with Annika Schlicht and Clay Hilley as the mezzo and tenor soloists.
6 p.m. Sunday, August 4, and Monday, August 5
$82-$119 (At press time, tickets for the Sunday performance were almost sold out and available only by phone.)
ALSO ON TAP THIS WEEK
= For the 11th consecutive year, the chamber music festival has commissioned string quartets from two young composers. Those by Jesse Reuben Jennings and David Clay Mettens will receive their world premieres on Friday, August 2, performed by the Flux Quartet.
Jennings is a Boston-based composer who is pursuing a doctorate in composition at the New England Conservatory of Music; his work includes film scores as well as concert music. Mettens is currently interim director of composition at Chicago's Roosevelt University and a teaching fellow at the University of Chicago, where he earned a doctorate in music composition in 2021.
Their new pieces flank the two-movement String Quartet by Witold Lutosawski, one of Poland's most-esteemed 20th-
century composers, written in 1964. It comes during a period when Lutosawski incorporated aleatory techniques,...