Happy February to all!
With the winter months slowly entering their final stretch with recent record snow, freezing rain and sleet, we welcome more sunlight hours and the tapping of Sarasa Co-Director Tim Merton’s maple trees!
If you missed the chance to hear our most recent concert-set, “Music from the Heart: Mitteldeutschland” with the wonderful countertenor Reginald Mobley, you are in for a treat! The concert will continue to stream for another few weeks. It has already garnered many views and much praise. Why not share the link with your Valentine, or some friends, or your colleagues, and of course your family?! It was a special evening of rarely heard 17th-century music from Germany that inspired the genius of Johann Sebastian Bach. Watch below!
©Ula Koska/Beate Bojda
Looking ahead to March, we are turning to Poland’s colorful cultural landscape for our musical inspiration, visiting boisterous Baroque works by Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767) and Johann Heinrich Schmelzer (1623-1680), alongside the soulful 2nd String Quartet by the popular 20th-century Polish composer, Henryk Górecki (1933-2010). Despite the many years that separate their eras, all three encountered enough musical ideas “to last a lifetime” (as Telemann wrote) through Poland's rich traditions of folk music, folk dance, and its many distinct regional characters. The program opens with Tomás Luis de Victoria’s sublime call to the world’s miracles in O magnum mysterium.
We are proud that this concert program has been selected by Early Music America as an Early Music Month Project Grantee, with the aim of expanding the reach of early music! Check out the other projects EMA will highlight in March—Early Music Month—here.
Native Realm*
March 4, 2022 Brattleboro Music Center, VT at 7.30pm [tickets: www.bmcvt.org]
March 5, 2022 Harvard-Epworth United Methodist Church, Cambridge at 7.30pm
March 6, 2022 Follen Community Church, Lexington at 3.30pm
*Title of Czesław Miłosz’s autobiography
Program:
Tomás Luis de Victoria O Magnum Mysterium (1572)
J.H. Schmelzer Polnische Sackpfeifen à 3 [Polish Bagpipes] (1680)
Telemann Polish Dances from the Rostock Manuscript, TWV 45 (1730’s?)
Górecki String Quartet No. 2, Op. 64 “Quasi una Fantasia” (1991)
Jesse Irons, Miranda Fulleylove, violins; Jason Fisher, viola; Jennifer Morsches, cello
The title of this program, "Native Realm” is taken from the autobiography by Górecki’s highly lauded compatriot, the great poet Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004). Both he and Górecki were indelibly shaped by the complex and difficult history of their native land during the 20th century.
“A Song on the End of the World
By Czesław Miłosz
Translated by Anthony Miłosz
On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.
On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.
And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.
Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.
Warsaw, 1944
”
St. Valentine’s Day— how do you celebrate? An anonymous Valentine card to your sweetheart? Chocolates? A dozen red roses? Or how about popping open a bottle of champagne?
For those silent film aficionados, we highly recommend Alfred Hitchcock’s Champagne (1928). Its opening sequence demonstrates the king of suspense well in his stride even at the start of his career, approaching visual effects from a completely different angle. The film in its entirety is on Vimeo, linked here. Watch its opening sequence below!
“Music is a pleasure for the saints and for men; it is an act of devotion, but also a symbol of human virtue.”
-Johann Heinrich Schmelzer
