PUTNEY — Yellow Barn looks to the skies this week as it remembers the 50th anniversary of the moon landing.
The festivities begin with concerts Thursday and Friday, plus a full day of events on Saturday including a viola masterclass, an afternoon of open rehearsals, a pre-concert discussion with Avi Loeb - professor of astronomy at Harvard University and director of Harvard's Black Hole Initiative - and a special performance of music inspired by the moon, from comic Baroque operas to Pierrot Lunaire to Across the Universe.
Thursday brings this year's much anticipated performance by baritone William Sharp and pianist Seth Knopp, who will continue their tradition of performing a song cycle each summer with a performance of Schubert's beloved Schwanengesang (Swansong).
A sonic exploration from spare to exuberant, Thursday's concert begins with Toru Takemitsu's sole work for cello and piano, Orion, based on the number symbolism of the three stars of Orion's belt, and ends with George Enescu's Octet for Strings in C Major, Op. 7 (Donald Weilerstein, violin; Roger Tapping, viola).
Written when Enescu was only 19 years old, the octet is considered one of his masterpieces. Thursday night's concert is dedicated to the Friends of Yellow Barn: for five decades, this group has helped Yellow Barn in all of its endeavors.
Friday evening brings Gabriel Fauré's Piano Quartet in G Minor, as well as a rare opportunity to hear a chamber work by the Finnish composer Kalevi Aho, principally known as a composer of large-scale works. Aho's Quintet for Bassoon and String Quartet opens the concert, preceding a work by Hans Werner Henze.
Henze's cantata Being Beauteous is based on the eponymous poem Les Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud and is the first of two vocal works to be performed Saturday.
The second is a selection from Johann Sebastian Bach's cantata Sehet, wir gehn hinauf gen Jerusalem (Behold, let us go up to Jerusalem) with William Sharp, baritone. The third BMC Night of the season, members of the Brattleboro Music Center receive half-price tickets to this performance.
Saturday's extravaganza starts with a master class by world renowned violist and sought-after pedagogue Kim Kashkashian. Following the master class is Yellow Barn's annual Open House, which affords members of the community the opportunity to spend an afternoon attending open rehearsals and sharing a meal with Yellow Barn's international community of musicians on campus at The Greenwood School.
On Saturday evening, Yellow Barn will welcome Avi Loeb to lead its pre-concert discussion. A theoretical physicist, Loeb is the Frank B. Baird Jr. professor of science at Harvard University. His talk, titled “Moonshots,” will touch upon the political context as well as the scientific implications of the 1969 moon landing.
That discussion sets the stage for Saturday's concert, which focuses on works related to the moon.
Harrison Birtwistle's Crescent Moon over the Irrational, with Anthony Marwood on violin, and Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, with soprano Lucy Shelton and pianist Seth Knopp, make up the first half of the program.
The second half of the concert consists of operatic settings by Franz Joseph Haydn and Baldassare Galuppi of Il mondo della luna (The World of the Moon) (Lucy Shelton, soprano; Benjamin Butterfield, tenor; William Sharp, baritone), along with George Crumb's Makrokosmos II and a special reimagining by Stephen Coxe of The Beatles' Across the Universe (William Sharp, baritone).
All concerts take place in the Big Barn at 8 p.m. Master classes are held in the Big Barn at 10:30 a.m. unless otherwise noted. This week's pre-concert discussion will be at the Putney Public Library at 6:45 p.m.