Midsummer’s Music Launches 2022 Concert Season

40+ exciting, pulse-pounding, riveting concerts featuring world-class chamber musicians

Sister Bay, Wis. (June 3, 2022) – Midsummer’s Music, Wisconsin’s oldest summer chamber music series, launches its 2022 concert season with a program celebrating the “unknown great” composers Friedrich Kiel and Joachim Raff.

Few composers have been lifted to the pantheon of greatness solely on the basis of their chamber music, although several have poured some of their finest efforts into this genre including Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, and Brahms for starters. But Kiel and Raff poured their most inspired music into their chamber pieces. Given the extraordinary quality of some of their chamber music and the fact that both composers are 200 years old this year, it is fitting to explore two works that present them in their best light. Joachim Raff is no stranger to Midsummer’s Music, having performed at least six of his works in prior seasons. Friedrich Kiel, on the other hand, is a welcome newcomer to the organization’s programming. Both composers – in their day – were expected to be remembered as being of the finest of their generations but soon fell into the oblivion of the near-great. Only in the last few decades has there been a reappraisal of their significance, and most of that reappraisal has been based on their chamber music.

The concert features Kiel’s lively Quartet No. 3 in G Minor, Op. 50, and Raff’s dramatic Quartet No. 2 in C Minor. Op. 202, masterfully performed by David Perry, violin, Sally Chisholm, viola, James Waldo, cello, and Jeannie Yu, piano. Following opening night at 7:00pm, June 9, at the Donald & Carol Kress Pavilion in Egg Harbor, this exciting program plays at Björklunden in Baileys Harbor at 7:00pm on June 11; as a 3:00pm matinée at Hope United Church of Christ in Sturgeon Bay on June 12; and at 7:00pm on June 14 at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Sister Bay.

The second program of the season, English Connections, features works by three English composers: Quartet No. 1, “Calvary” (1956) by Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson; Phantasy Quintet (1912) by Ralph Vaughn Williams; and Quintet No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 86, by Charles Villiers Stanford. This program will be performed four times: June 16 at 7:00pm at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Sister Bay; June 19 at 5:00pm at Woodwalk Gallery in Egg Harbor, dedicated to the memory of Arnie Widen; June 21 at 5:00pm at the Historic Town Hall in Fish Creek, dedicated to the memory of Spencer Gould and with an optional post-concert dinner at Alexander’s; and June 23 at 7:00pm at the Donald & Carol Kress Pavilion in Egg Harbor. English Connections program musicians are David Perry and Ann Palen, violins, Sally Chisholm and Allyson Fleck, violas, and James Waldo, cello.

A complete 2022 summer brochure can be downloaded at www.midsummersmusic.com.

Tickets are $35 for adults, $15 for students, and children 12 and under are free. Premium prices apply for salon/home concerts, dinner concerts and other special events, including opening night. Flex-packs of six tickets for the price of five tickets are also available. Tickets can be ordered at www.midsummersmusic.com or by phone at 920-854-7088.

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.