Welcome to our January Newsletter!
“Midnight Sun” by Julie Paschkis
A very happy new year to everyone! And a huge thank you for all of the extremely generous donations Sarasa received at the end of 2023! Your gifts make every aspect of our programming possible. We hope 2024 will bring much needed peace in the world and a continued celebration of the arts, such an important aspect of our shared humanity.
Conductor Marin Alsop reminded the public at the last night of the BBC Proms in 2023:
up next: french new wave baroque
We are excited to kick off the new year with a beautiful chamber music program dedicated to mostly French baroque composers who developed a “new wave” of music by marrying two great national styles of music: French and Italian. The German native, Georg Philipp Telemann rode the wave with great panache, composing two sets of quartets for flute, violin, viola da gamba, cello and harpsichord for his adoring fans in Paris. Sometimes an outsider is best equipped to understand a country’s changing fads and needs! We will be performing the last quartet from the set he composed in 1738 during his visit to the French capital. Some of the performers who premiered the work are also represented on our program, including the virtuoso flutist, Michel Blavet, who helped catapult the flûte allemande to become one of the most popular instruments played in Paris in the 18th century, The violinist who also performed with him, the Italian-born Jean-Pierre Guignon, was hailed for mastery of the instrument; he was a true believer that music should “astonish and entertain.” Also on the program is a solo harpsichord piece from the most distinguished female French composer of the Baroque era, Élisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre.
Thursday, January 11, 2024 at 7pm at Brattleboro Music Center, Brattleboro VT (tickets at bmcvt.org)
Saturday, January 13, 2024 at 7pm at Friends Meeting House, Cambridge
Sunday, January 14, 2024 at 7pm at Follen Community Church, Lexington
film corner:
French New Wave cinema is the inspiration behind the concert title for our January set. Borrowing from Italy’s cinematic school of Neorealism of the 1940s, French film directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol took the world by storm in the 1950s and 1960s. By moving away from the old establishment of stuffy conventions, they promoted a new kind freedom by filming realistic, quotidian situations and subjects, often with hand-held cameras. Here’s the iconic dance scene from Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande à part (Band of Outsiders) from 1964.
listening corner:
Sarasa will be performing the final “Paris” quartet in E minor from Telemann’s set of Nouveaux quatuors he composed and published in 1738. The chatty exchanges between each solo instrument are full of elegant gestures, fancy footwork, and a demanding, yet natural-sounding virtuosity.
france in the kitchen
Along with music, art, theatre, architecture, la France is revered for its hâute-cuisine, which follows certain conventions of strict hierarchy. Well, thanks to the American doyenne of the Art of French Cooking, Julia Child has eased our collective nerves in preparing French sauces, sugar syrups, caramels, and such.
À table!
video corner:
There’s still time to view our November live performance of Tendrils of the Soul, featuring sublime music by Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert! With Zenas Hsu, Amy Galluzzo, violins: Marka Gustavsson, viola; Timothy Merton and Jennifer Morsches, cellos.
Click below to watch!
Wrong entrance!
@Jane Adams
