Great Barrington — It is trout season in the Berkshires—at least in chamber music circles: Schubert’s Trout Quintet seems to be all the rage in 2023. But it is also the season for fundraising galas, and Close Encounters with Music (CEWM) is holding theirs on Sunday, June 11 at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center at 4 p.m. Food is involved, of course, and CEWM has a reputation for serving the best. (See special ticket packages, below.)
Sunday’s program consists of two pioneering piano quintets from masters of the genre, Robert Schumann and Franz Schubert. A lineup of celebrated string players, along with Van Cliburn Gold Medalist Yekwon Sunwoo, will perform Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E-flat Major and Schubert’s Quintet in A Major (“The Trout”), two of the most beloved and frequently performed chamber music works in the repertoire.
Robert Schumann exemplifies the romantic spirit by virtue of being one of it’s chief progenitors. His exuberant E-flat quintet appears to be the earliest of the standard works for piano plus string quartet, and practically every romantic-era composer you can name followed his lead: Brahms, Dvořák, Sibelius, Bartók, Martinů, Elgar, Franck, Borodin, Carter, and literally dozens of others, all the way up to the present. This seminal piece showcases Schumann’s unique harmonic language and distinctive style as a keyboardist and composer as well as anything in his body of work.
The boring parts of this piece are … nowhere to be found. Sure, that’s partly owing to our general familiarity with it, but we’re familiar with it because Schumann had a habit of writing unforgettable music. The piece flies by, and before you know it, 30 minutes has elapsed.
Sunwoo will, no doubt, crush this piece with overwhelming pianistic chops, but when they reach the third-movement scherzo, that’s when the virtuosic sparks will really fly. Picture Felix Mendelssohn sight-reading this piece at its premier, when an ailing Clara Schumann fell ill at the 11th hour. Astonishing.
Just weeks ago, I wrote about Aston Magna’s trout-themed program and revealed a little known fact about Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet. (He omitted the decisive last verse of Christian Schubart’s poem “Die Forelle” and changed the meaning of it. Pity.)
Joining Sunwoo on piano will be violinists Giora Schmidt and Helena Baillie, with Yehuda Hanani on cello, Jeremy McCoy on double bass, and a violist still to be named.
It is not enough to describe Yekwon Sunwoo as the winner of prestigious competitions. The Washington Post wrote, “Nothing about Sunwoo’s program smacked of the showpiece territory exemplified by music competitions … Sunwoo gave the piece orchestral scope, not necessarily in volume, but in variety of color, using all three pedals to create sculpted sound worlds that caught the opera’s vast but intimate scale.”
The News-Gazette wrote, “Clearly a major talent, Sunwoo played with the most delicate sensitivity and also with enormous power and dazzling velocity when the music demanded those skills. Sunwoo is a poet of the keyboard, with obvious Romantic sensibilities …”
Hear pianist Yekwon Sunwoo and friends perform Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet and Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E-flat Major at the Close Encounters with Music gala concert at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center on Sunday, June 11 at 4 p.m. Mahaiwe tickets are available here. The preferred patron gala package is available here, and the subscriber dinner reservation is available here.
With any luck, they’ll serve trout pâté.
