Valley Of The Moon Music Festival Announces 2021 Blattner Lecture Series

Valley of the Moon Music Festival announces its 2021 Blattner Lecture Series, featuring Christine Brandes, soprano; Carlo Caballero, Associate Professor of Music, University of Colorado, Boulder; Christian De Luca, pianist, VMMF TANK Trust Laureate; Heather Hadlock, Associate Professor, Stanford University; Alex Ross, critic, The New Yorker and Kate van Orden, bassoonist and Dwight P. Robinson Jr. Professor of Music at Harvard University, who also oversees the series.

The Blattner Lecture Series has been an integral part of the Valley of the Moon Music Festival since the summer of 2018, helping listeners experience each season's overarching theme more fully. Each season, before selected concerts, dynamic speakers introduce listeners to different perspectives and offer a deeper understanding of the music being performed.

All lectures are free and open to the public. RSVP is required for the live Zoom lectures. Speaker bios, dates and times are available at

Learn more at https://valleyofthemoonmusicfestival.org/blattner-lectures/.

2021 BLATTNER LECTURE SERIES DETAILS

AVAILABLE NOW:

Christine Brandes in Conversation with bass-baritone Dashon Burton

Christine Brandes' interview with Festival Artist Dashon Burton is currently available on-demand on the VMMF YouTube channel. Be sure to watch their fascinating conversation before Dashon's July 22nd Festival debut!

Upcoming Programming

July 22, 11AM: Alex Ross: Burleigh & Dvořák

Lecture available on-demand beginning July 22nd on the VMMF YouTube channel.

The New Yorker writer Alex Ross explores the influential, but under-appreciated American composer and baritone Harry Burleigh. Burleigh's meeting and ensuing friendship with Dvořák in New York resulted in a lasting effect on Dvorak's music. In connection with VMMF's concert "Collaboration," this lecture will address this fascinating relationship between two great composers.

July 24, 11AM: Heather Hadlock: Imagining Friendships

Live Zoom lecture and conversation. RSVP here.

This lecture will consider the overlapping lives of Clara Schumann, Fanny Hensel, and Louise Farrenc, three brilliant and prolific pianist-composers of the Romantic era. What did they have in common? How did their creative lives and opportunities differ according to the city, class, and family each was born into? Where did their paths cross, and what did they know of each other? Above all, what might they have heard and appreciated in each others' music?

July 29, 11AM: Carlo Caballero: The Mysteries of Gabriel Fauré

Lecture available on-demand beginning July 29th on the VMMF YouTube channel.

Fauré's Second Piano Quartet, Op. 45, is surrounded in mystery. Dr. Caballero will unveil the scant historical information around the creation of this work and then focus on the expressive world of each of its four movements.

July 31, 11AM: Kate van Orden: Conversations with Kate - Romanticism

Live Zoom lecture and conversation. RSVP here.

Love and Longing! The festival theme beautifully captures the essence of Romanticism, both the endless longing from which any true romantic necessarily suffered and the dark, unsettled quality of the music. In this year's final talk, Kate van Orden discusses the nineteenth-century cult of emotion, the musicians, poets, and artists who lived by it, and how it was that music became a model for all the arts and Romanticism itself as an infinite striving toward the unattainable.

TANK Trust Laureate Christian De Luca will provide a series called "Dolci Parole" or "sweet words" - a series of 3 minute, pre-recorded introductions that will be sent out before each weekend concert. The series was recorded from the piano shop below his home in Rome, Italy.

The Valley of the Moon Music Festival brings the captivating sound of period instruments to the world of Classical and Romantic chamber music for its 2021 season, Love and Longing: Reaching Across the Distance. A series of nine curated programs inspired by the fundamental human desire to connect, the Festival brings together artists and audiences across digital platforms and modified in-person live performances, July 17 - August 1, 2021.

Please visit https://valleyofthemoonmusicfestival.org/ for Festival details.