Friday, August 17, 2018

Next CMSSF Concert to Offer Mozart and Brahms

The Chamber Music Society of San Francisco (CMSSF) has announced the program for its next San Francisco concert. Regular readers probably know by now that this is the name of the string quartet founded by violinists Natasha Makhijani and Jory Fankuchen, violist Clio Tilton, and cellist Samsun van Loon. The title of their new program will be Illuminating Influence. They will perform Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 465 (Dissonance) quartet in C major.

Opening measures of K. 465 (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

This is the last of the six quartets that Mozart dedicated to Joseph Haydn and the one that best constitutes a “response” to the “call” of some of Haydn’s more adventurous approaches to harmonic progression. As can be seen in the except of the opening measures above, only the cello establishes C major as the basic pitch, while each of the other instruments tries to pull the tonal center in another direction (with no agreement among them as to where that center should be). Nevertheless, things settle down in time for the Allegro portion of the movement to romp its way through C major.

Once again, the recital will feature a guest artist. Violist Marcel Gemperli will join the quartet in a performance of Johannes Brahms Opus 88 (first) string quintet in F major. After completing the piece, Brahms declared to Clara Schumann that it was “one of [his] finest works.” Thus, it may well be that Brahms was thinking of her while working on the score. This selection will complement the program CMSSF presented in January of 2017, when they played Brahms’ Opus 115 clarinet quintet in B minor with guest artist Steven Sánchez.

This concert will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, September 15, and is expected to last about two hours. The venue will be Holy Innocent’s Episcopal Church, which is located in the Mission at 455 Fair Oaks Street. Ticket prices at the door will be $25 with a $5 rate for those aged eighteen and under. Tickets may be purchased online in advance through an Eventbrite event page.

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