Valley Of The Moon Music Festival Kicks Off Its 2021 Season

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, which kicks off on July 17 at 4 p.m. PDT with "Longing: Mendelssohn Quartet & German Songs."

Mendelssohn's String Quartet in A Minor is one of the greatest masterpieces of all time, written when the composer was only 17. It was modeled on Beethoven's own A minor quartet - to be featured on VMMF's July 31 concert - as well as on "Frage," a romantic song by Mendelssohn himself. A selection of songs on themes of longing and loss rounds out the program, which features Emily Marvosh, contralto and Eric Zivian, fortepiano, and the VMMF quartet, Anna Presler, violin, Liana Bérubé, violin, Phyllis Kamrin, viola, and Tanya Tomkins, cello.

VMMF's 2021 season features a series of nine curated programs inspired by the fundamental human desire to connect, and brings together artists and audiences across digital platforms and modified in-person live performances, July 17 - August 1, 2021.

Each Festival program tells a larger story of separation, longing, and coming together through the chamber music of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Dvořák, and more. From Clara Schumann to the American composer Harry Burleigh, art songs, inspired by their magnificent poetry, serve as another vehicle for expressing the Festival's theme.

VMMF artists will perform all the music on instruments that match the period when the music was composed: gut strings rather than steel strings for the string players, and four different period pianos. The earliest and smallest fortepiano, perfect for the music of Mozart, is a copy of a Dulcken (Vienna, 1795), built in the 1980s in Berkeley by Paul Poletti and Janine Johnson. The early Romantic repertoire will be performed with an original Viennese fortepiano from 1841 by Franz Rausch, and the later songs by Debussy and others, as well as Fauré's Piano Quartet, will be performed on a Chickering piano from the 1890s, courtesy of the UC Berkeley Music Department. Finally, for the early 20th-century American program, VMMF will feature a 1901 Knabe.

Virtual Concert Subscription: $35 reservation fee + $135 suggested donation.

Single Virtual Concert: $5 reservation fee + $20 suggested donation.

https://valleyofthemoonmusicfestival.org/virtual-concerts-2021/

Tickets for the live performances at Hanna Boys Center may be purchased at https://valleyofthemoonmusicfestival.org/live-concerts-2021/.

Complementing the Festival's main musical programs, VMMF's Blattner Lecture Series features 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.