PUTNEY — Yellow Barn's Artist Residencies concert series continues on Sunday, Oct. 2, with a double-bill of free concerts at 3 and 7 p.m. in the Big Barn.
“Over the course of two distinct concerts the performance of Schumann's three quartets, intertwined with wisps of Schumann's own sketches for these works and the music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven from which he took inspiration, sheds light on how we define what is 'new' in art, and why that is important,” artistic director Seth Knopp said in a news release.
Led by violinist Anthony Marwood, Yellow Barn musicians include So-Young Choi, Julia Mirzoev, and Grace Park, violins; Natalie Loughran and Rosemary Nelis, violas; and Natasha Brofsky, Edvard Pogossian, and Aaron Wolff, cellos.
“It is of course a special pleasure to return to Yellow Barn in the 'opposite' season, to work on such an intense and exciting program with inspiring colleagues. Yellow Barn is an artistic center of gravity for me,” said Marwood, a Yellow Barn musician since 2000.
Based in Sussex and Amsterdam, Marwood was the violinist of the Florestan Trio for 16 years and won the Royal Philharmonic Society Instrumentalist Award in 2006. In 2018, he was awarded an MBE in the Queen's 2018 New Year Honours list.
Composer Robert Schumann, whose life was dominated by alternating periods of depression and manic creativity, wrote his quartets during a six-month surge that would become known as his “year of chamber music.” On Sept. 13, 1842, he gave them to his wife, Clara Schumann, as a surprise birthday present. Of the quartets (and her husband) she wrote, “My veneration for his genius, for his mind, for everything about him as a composer, grows with every new work! As for the quartets, I can only say that they delight me down to the smallest detail. Everything is new.”
The purpose of Yellow Barn's Artist Residencies, the first retreat program in the United States created specifically for performing musicians, is to further the art of classical music performance by providing an environment conducive to undistracted study, an exchange of ideas, and opportunities for performance, states a news release.
Their content is defined by artists' proposals and Yellow Barn's artistic vision, and musicians come to Yellow Barn to create new repertoire, to prepare for major performances, to explore new interpretations of important works, and to stage theatrical events.