PUTNEY — Yellow Barn's Summer Artist Residency concert series will be live-streamed from the Big Barn this season, starting July 10.
Over the course of seven weeks, 18 resident musicians will explore 43 works of chamber music, each of which will be presented in a live stream concert. From July 10 to Aug. 9, 10 broadcasts will air on Yellow Barn's website at 7:30 p.m., and 2 p.m. the following day.
The concerts will be 60 to 90 minutes in length, and will be presented free of charge at www.yellowbarn.org.
“While we are not able to gather our entire Yellow Barn family this year, we have created a series of Summer Artist Residencies, allowing some of our musicians to be here as representatives of the whole,” Artistic Director Seth Knopp said in a news release.
Yellow Barn's Artist Residencies, which have generated a body of more than 50 programs in the past 12 years, offer an unforeseen model for this time, with musicians living in separate guest homes, rehearsing while physically distancing, and streaming performances from the Big Barn.
The first performance will take place on what would have been the Yellow Barn summer festival's opening night, Friday, July 10. The program opens with a performance of Charles Ives's Concord Sonata, performed by pianist Gilbert Kalish.
Following a brief intermission, the evening continues with the premiere of Entstehung Heiliger Dankgesang by Yellow Barn's resident composer Stephen Coxe and the Heiliger Dankgesang movement of Beethoven's Op. 132 string quartet (violinists Alice Ivy-Pemberton and Emma Frucht, violist Roger Tapping, and cellist Coleman Itzkoff).
The program on Saturday, July 11, will include two works for percussion performed by Eduardo Leandro (Lei Liang's Trans and Frederic Rzewski's To The Earth). Also on the program are Anton Webern (Five Movements for String Quartet), Benjamin Britten's Elegy for Solo Viola, and Antonín Dvorák's Bagatelles, with Seth Knopp joining the quartet from the previous evening's performance.
The remaining concert schedule is:
• Thursday, July 16: The complete cello suites of J.S. Bach (1720) Part I, A Tribute to David Wells on His Birthday.
• Saturday, July 18: The complete cello suites of J.S. Bach (1720) Part II.
• Thursday, July 23: Composer Portrait: Mario Davidovsky Synchronisms.
• Saturday, July 25: Works by Schubert, Kirsten, Laplante, and Hosokawa.
• Thursday, July 30: Works by Coxe, Ridout, Applebaum and Andresson, all based on children's books.
• Saturday, Aug. 1: Works by Aperghis, Lim, Cage, Aucoin, Manoury, and J.S. Bach.
• Friday, Aug. 7: Gyorgy Kurtag: Kafka Fragments.
• Saturday, Aug. 8: Works by Hersant, Shostakovich, Golijov, and MacMillan.
In addition, the season will include five performances from John Cage's Song Books Volume I, one performed by Anthony Marwood and Walter Van Dyk, and four by Lucy Shelton.
In addition to those performing this weekend, Yellow Barn musicians in residence this summer include violinists Adelya Nartadjieva and Mark Steinberg, cellists Natasha Brofsky, Michael Katz, Gabriel Martins, and Aaron Wolff, double bassist Lizzie Burns, clarinetist Yasmina Spiegelberg, saxophonist Travis Laplante, percussionist Ayano Kataoka, and sopranos Tony Arnold, Lucy Fitz Gibbon, Elaine Daiber, and Lucy Shelton.
This is the first summer in over 50 years that Yellow Barn hasn't hosted its annual festival. In speaking about the genesis of this summer's Artist Residencies, Knopp assured musicians and audiences that, “Ours is not a summer lost, but a festival delayed.”
For more information, contact [email protected] or 802-387-6637.