My picks for your weekend classical music fix
People occasional say to me that I need to clone myself.
I figure one of me is trouble enough (just ask my other half), but the thought does seem enticing whenever I'm spoiled for choice facing well-worth-checking-out performances scheduled on the same day, more or less at the same time.
Here comes another such occasion.
On Sunday afternoon, two events in Towson look awfully good. I recommend them both and leave it you to settle on just one.
Music in the Great Hall opens its season at 3 p.m. Sunday at Towson Unitarian Universalist Church with the fusion of three fine instrumentalists: clarinetist Anthony McGill, who holds a principal chair in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and teaches at Peabody; cellist Amit Peled, who has a busy concert career and also teaches at Peabody; and pianist Lura Johnson, who frequently has keyboard duty in Baltimore Symphony concerts and collaborates regularly with individual members of the orchestra in recitals and chamber music gigs.
The program includes
the Clarinet Trio by Brahms, the Cello Sonata by Chopin and more.
At 3:30 p.m. Sunday, Pro Musica Rara opens its season at Towson University's Center for the Arts with a nod to Robert Schumann's bicentennial.
Pro Musica specializes in period instrument performances, which automatically makes the program interesting. The inclusion of Schumann's Piano Quartet makes it all the more notable -- at least to me, since I consider the slow movement from that quartet to be one of the most beautiful creations in all of music (so I'm prone to superlatives -- what's it to ya?).
The players are among Pro Musica's finest: fortepianist Edmund Battersby, a busy concert artist and longtime faculty member at Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music; violinist Cynthia Roberts, a frequent concertmaster for leading period instrument ensembles, including Apollo's Fire; violist Sharon Pineo Myer, a 30-year-plus veteran of the BSO and Pro Musica; and cellist Allen Whear, Pro Musica's artistic director, who is also associate principal cellist of the noted Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra.
Rounding out the program will be additional works by Schumann and his wife, Clara, not to mention their mutual friend Brahms. Some Mendelssohn, too.
SUN FILE PHOTOS
