(GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass.) – Works by Liszt, Brahms, and Bartók will be featured in “MAGYAR!”, a program of Hungarian- and Gypsy-influenced music, at the Mahaiwe on Sunday, April 27, 2014, at 3pm, as part of the Close Encounters With Music series of chamber concerts. Musicians include Roma performer Cosmo Gorcsi, on cimbalom – a hammered dulcimer that is the national folk instrument of Hungary – and the concert will also include traditional folk music.

The program features Béla Bartók’s 1938 Contrasts for Clarinet, Violin and Piano, commissioned by jazz legend Benny Goodman, an amalgam of abstracted Hungarian folk music combined with Romanian dance melodies taking advantage of the tone and color of the three different instruments, different musical idioms, and jazz and classical modes. Both violist and clarinetist require two instruments apiece to capture the dual character and the disparate tunings — gritty country fiddle-atmosphere with barbaric energy, dances, and syncopations, and the concert-worthy brilliant passage work and polish. Also on the program is another Hungarian “Rhapsody,” a virtuosic work for cello and piano by David Popper, a famous 19th century cellist.  It concludes with Brahms’s Piano Trio No. 2 in C Major, with its Magyar themes.

Guest artists joining artistic director and cellist Yehuda Hanani are Erin Keefe, concertmaster of the Minnesota Orchestra and winner of the 2006 Avery Fisher Career Grant, who appears regularly at Lincoln and has been featured on “Live From Lincoln Center” broadcasts; Alexander Fiterstein, one of today’s top-tier clarinet players and winner of a 2009 Avery Fisher Career Grant Award; and pianist Lydia Artymiw, another Avery Fisher Award winner who has performed with over one hundred orchestras worldwide, including the Boston Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the National Symphony.

Roma performer Cosmo Gorcsi will demonstrate the expressive and haunting qualities of the cimbalom in traditional Magyar melodies, as well as its visual beauty. With its horizontal strings, two beaters, and tremolo sound, the cimbalom’s special effect —f amiliar to concert audiences from Hungarian composer Zoltan Kodaly’s opera Hary Jano — is used in film to evoke mystery and intrigue.

 

Ticket Information for MAGYAR!

Tickets, $45 (Orchestra and Mezzanine) and $25 (Balcony), are available at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center box office, 413.528.0100; through Close Encounters With Music at 800-843-0778; or by emailing cewmusic@aol.com.

 

Close Encounters With Music (CEWM) stands at the intersection of music, art and the vast richness of Western culture. Entertaining, erudite and lively commentary from founder and Artistic Director Yehuda Hanani puts the composers and their times in perspective to enrich the concert experience. Since the inception of its Commissioning Project in 2001, CEWM has worked with the most distinguished composers of our time — Paul Schoenfield, Osvaldo Golijov, Lera Auerbach, Robert Beaser, Kenji Bunch, and John Musto, among others — to create important new works that have already taken their place in the chamber music canon and on CD.

A core of brilliant performers includes pianists Adam Neiman, Walter Ponce Roman Rabinovich and Jeffrey Swann; violinists Shmuel Ashkenasi, Yehonatan Berick, Vadim Gluzman and Igamar Zorman; harpsichordist Lionel Party; clarinetists Alexander Fiterstein, Charles Neidich; vocalists Dawn Upshaw, Amy Burton, Jennifer Aylmer, Robert White, Lucille Beer and William Sharp; the Vermeer, Amernet, Muir, Manhattan, Avalon, Hugo Wolf quartets, and Cuarteto Latinoamericano; and guitarist Eliot Fisk. Choreographer David Parsons and actors Richard Chamberlain, Jane Alexander and Sigourney Weaver have also appeared as guests, weaving narration and dance into the fabric of the programs.

Weekly segments of “Classical Music According to Yehuda” are broadcast on WAMC Northeast Public Radio every Friday morning at around 11:30.