"To Beethoven Rather Than To Seem" Part 2

Featuring Allen Anderson's Linen along with Beethoven's op. 30 nos. 1 and 2.

This season, Gut Instinct takes on the large-scale project “To Beethoven Rather Than To Seem,” marking 200 years since Beethoven’s death and 250 since the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Over the course of five concerts, Nicholas DiEugenio and pianist Mimi Solomon will present all ten Beethoven Sonatas on period instruments along with five commissioned works written expressly for them.

Following our acclaimed one-voice-per-part performance of Bach’s Mass in B minor, the Sebastians return to the music at the heart of Bach’s career: the church cantata. Featuring two of his most beloved masterpieces—Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme (BWV 140) and Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott (BWV 80)—this program offers a rare chance to hear Bach’s sacred music with the transparency, intimacy, and expressive power of four individual voices, creating a sound world remarkably close to what Bach himself likely heard in Leipzig.

The concert program juxtaposes the music of Brahms with the work of American and Polish composers, creating a musical dialogue about memory, transformation, and the evolution of the violin and piano duet tradition. The centerpiece of the program is Johannes Brahms's Sonata No. 2 in A major for violin and piano. Its reflective nature permeates the entire four-movement work, which features graceful melodies, the subtly swaying rhythms of Hungarian dances, and an intimate dialogue between violin and piano. The sonata's warmth and lyricism serve as a springboard for the other compositions presented during the concert. David Kirkland Garner's lyrical and contemplative piece, "Sky Was Good for Flying,"  was composed in 2016 with Nicholas DiEugenio and Mimi Solomon in mind. In it, the composer transforms his inspiration from Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata, creating his own dreamlike and meditative sound world, which provides a striking contrast to, and an interesting complement to Brahms's sonata. Karol Szymanowski's Romance, Op. 23, on the other hand, combines lush, late Romantic chromaticism with beautiful melodies rooted in the tradition of Polish music. The result is a poetic musical language of unique, entirely individual character.