PUTNEY — On Tuesday, Oct. 27, Artistic Director Seth Knopp brings together nine summer musicians for a final evening of Yellow Barn's fall discussion series, Patio Noise.
Focusing on the 2020 summer season finale, performers and listeners will discuss Knopp's Aug. 8 program, including Dmitri Shostakovich's gripping Seven Romances, a John Cage solo for voice, Philippe Hersant's In the Dark for solo clarinet, and an outdoor recording of Osvaldo Golijov's Tenebrae for soprano, clarinet, and string quartet, before returning to the Big Barn for James MacMillan's Angel for solo piano.
The full concert is available for streaming on the Yellow Barn website. Tuesday's online discussion will take place via Zoom, from 4:30 to 5:45 p.m.
“In Tuesday's discussion, audience members and musicians have an opportunity to discuss a program that reflects present-day realities and also provides solace,” the organization writes in a news release.
Joining Knopp will be musicians from the season finale: sopranos Tony Arnold, Lucy Fitz Gibbon, and Lucy Shelton; clarinetist Yasmina Spiegelberg; violinists Alice Ivy-Pemberton, Adelya Nartadjieva, and Mark Steinberg; and cellist Coleman Itzkoff.
The musicians will speak about the program and their month-long residencies last summer. They first worked separately during quarantine periods, and then came together in rehearsal and performance of their first in-person musical experiences since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the middle of the program, the Shostakovich and Golijov works provide stark contrast - a broad tension and release.
Shostakovich's Seven Romances was premiered during the 50th anniversary year of the October Revolution, performed by a group of close friends at odds with their government. Golijov's Tenebrae was inspired both by the violence that surrounded him in Israel and by the perspective of Earth as a “beautiful blue dot in space” that he witnessed with his son at the planetarium in New York City.
In introducing Golijov's work, Fitz Gibbon writes, “The communion that we all experience in giving and attending concerts has made [COVID-19-era] performances akin to that blue dot in space: a moment of recognition of what was, constrained within the four corners of a computer screen. And yet this change of perspective also offers an opportunity to reconsider, to give thanks.
“The first note I sang outside of my living room quarantine was a revelation. Finishing this summer at Yellow Barn with Golijov's Tenebrae feels deeply meaningful, a reminder that the darkness we find ourselves in now will not only be followed by light, but also now allows us to see the stars.”
For more information, visit yellowbarn.org or call 802-387-6637.