"A Musical Feast" Celebrates the Art of Charles Burchfield
On April 15, at 7pm "
A Musical Feast," one of the premier chamber music groups in Western New York, presents a free concert in the Peter and Elizabeth Tower Auditorium of the Burchfield Penney Art
Center. The event is co-sponsored by the Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music, University at Buffalo.
"A Musical Feast" was founded in 2006
by the then recently retired Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra concertmaster Charles Haupt. After several successful seasons at the Kavinoky Theatre on the D'Youville College campus, in
the spring of 2009 the group was named the resident music ensemble of the new Burchfield Penney Art Center on Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo.
The program for the April 15
concert at the Burchfield Penney is inspired by the current exhibition at the museum, "Heat Waves in a Swamp" (March 7-May 23) featuring the works of the museum's namesake,
Charles Burchfield. The travelling exhibit was organized by the Hammer Museum at the University of California at Los Angeles, in collaboration with the Burchfield Penney.
Charles
Burchfield wrote "My diary seems to be a journal of the wind, sunshine and sky," and one can say very much the same for most of the artists' large output of watercolor paintings.
Burchfield's watercolors offer a very intimate study of our local skies, winds, clouds, and our summer storms. The artist wrote "I find no sympathetic beauty in the sky I have not
lived under. On a mild sunny day (completely cloudless) with a vigorous west wind – I knew I had to go out painting."
Barry Crawford
is the flute soloist in composer David Felder's November Sky. The title refers obliquely to the psychologically shifting perspectives that accompany seasonal change;
particularly the affect surrounding the inexorably failing light as fall gives way to winter. The 1992 work is the third in the composer's "Crossfire" series, a group of
works featuring the playing of a virtuoso soloist interacting with his/her own electronically altered sonic image.
NeXT computers were used to process a huge library of
archetypal flute sounds, made by the soloist using only an acoustic flute. This library of acoustic flute sounds was then used to create the four channels of computer-processed flute
sounds employed in November Sky.
Pianists Claudia Hoca and Phyllis East will perform a piano four-hand version of the orchestral fantasy
Capriccio Italien, Op. 45, by the Russian composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The composition is very reminiscent of Italian folk music and street songs, and it was inspired by
an extended 1880 winter vacation that Tchaikovsky took to Rome, during which he experienced the Carnival season in full swing. The work was later arranged by the composer himself for
piano four hands; arrangements of orchestral works for piano were often the only method that allowed many listeners, and performers for that matter, to enjoy works composed for
orchestra, before the advent of music recording.
The evening of music concludes with Franz Schubert's greatest chamber work, the String Quintet in C major, D. 956, Op. 163
, one of the essential masterworks of the entire chamber music repertoire. Composed during the summer of 1828, only two months before his death, it was Schubert's final
instrumental composition, and the transcendental beauty of the work is generally recognized as his most deeply sublime composition. The work will be performed by Charles Haupt
(violin), Shieh-Jian Tsai (violin), Feng Hew (cello), Robert Hausmann (cello) and Virginia Barron (viola).
Admission to the event is free, though
seating in the 156 seat Tower Auditorium is limited; to reserve a seat call: 878-6011. For more information visit:
