MARLBORO — Regular attendees at the weekend concerts at Vermont's storied Marlboro Music Festival are used to musical discoveries and varied programs from this international gathering of classical music royalty whose multi-week explorations of over 200 pieces with their younger colleagues uncover new insights in familiar as well as new works.
The concerts this weekend on Saturday, July 28, at 8 p.m., and Sunday, July 29, at 2:30 p.m., at Marlboro College's Persons Auditorium are no exception.
Saturday's program offers an especially eclectic mix with the Schubert String Quartet in C, D. 46, written when the composer was only 16; Resident Composer Shulamit Ran's Stream for clarinet and string quartet; and Zemlinsky's romantic, 10-minute Maiblumen blühten überall, an 1898 work for voice and string sextet that predates Schoenberg's stylistically similar Verklärte Nacht.
The program's second half presents pianist Dénes Várjon with violinist Siwoo Kim and cellist Alice Yoo in the Beethoven Trio in E-flat Major, Op. 70, No. 2.
Sunday will delight piano aficionados with both Jonathan Biss and Mitsuko Uchida, Marlboro's artistic director, performing.
Biss opens the program, joined by violinist Stephen Waarts and cellist Sayaka Selina in the Schumann Piano Trio in F Major, Op. 80, followed by Shulamit Ran's Lyre of Orpheus for string sextet.
After intermission, Uchida, violinist Waarts, violist Hsin-Yun Huang and cellist Alexander Hersh will offer Mozart's Piano Quartet in E-flat, K. 493.
Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Shulamit Ran is spending two weeks in residence at Marlboro sharing her ideas on the six works of hers being explored, many of them for up to five weeks, by 29 different participating artists.
Stream, for clarinet and string quartet, was premiered in April 2016 at the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society by Anthony McGill and the Brentano Quartet - all former Marlboro participants. The Society was founded by longtime Marlboro Administrator Anthony Checchia and is now directed by Marlboro Artistic Administrator Miles Cohen.