Programs in Green Bay and Door County highlight composers who borrowed elements from other types of music and compositional styles.
Sister Bay, Wis. (March 5, 2024) – Midsummer’s Music’s resident string quartet, the Griffon String Quartet, will perform three inspiring March concerts featuring classical music with elements borrowed from other types of music and compositional styles.
Composed between 1921 and 1929, Amy Beach’s String Quartet, Op. 89, is an early 20th century Romantic piece that incorporates native American Intuit music into her own eclectic style. The Intuit are a group of culturally and historically similar Indigenous people traditionally inhabiting the Arctic and subarctic regions of North America. Among myriad traditions, music is an important part of the culture.
Pianist Nikolai Kapustin was born in Ukraine in 1937 and was classically trained at the Moscow Conservatory. His String Quartet No. 1, Op. 88, combines classical music with jazz foundations, which is a hallmark of his compositional style. Following Josef Stalin’s death, Kapustin was exposed to jazz – a style of music that was banned in the USSR – on the “Voice of America” radio show. Until recently, the composer’s works were not available in the West.
String Quartet No. 1, Op. 4, by Alexander von Zemlinsky was influenced by works by Johannes Brahms. Brahms even attended at least two performances of Zemlinsky’s pieces – a symphony and a quartet – and was impressed enough to recommend the young composer’s Clarinet Trio to be published.
Concerts will be at 5:00pm, March 15, at Hope United Church of Christ in Sturgeon Bay; 3:00pm, March 16, at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Green Bay; and at 3:00pm, March 17, at the Donald & Carol Kress Pavilion in Egg Harbor. Admission is free to the concerts, and tickets can be reserved at midsummersmusic.com or by calling 920-854-7088. Donations will be accepted at the door. Griffon String Quartet musicians will be Roy Meyer and Alex Norris, violins, Kayla Patrick, viola, and Jesse Nummelin, cello.
Programs are funded in part by grants from Bader Philanthropies, the Door County Community Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Wisconsin Arts Board. Programs in Green Bay are funded in part by grants from the Green Bay Packers Foundation and the Greater Green Bay Community Foundation.
Midsummer’s Music was co-founded in 1990 by Jim and Jean Berkenstock, long-time Door County summer residents and principal orchestral players with the Lyric Opera of Chicago. What began as two concerts among friends has become one of the Midwest’s most anticipated chamber music series, bringing thousands of chamber music enthusiasts from around the globe to the magical Door County Peninsula.