September is a month not only highly anticipated by parents of school-aged children but also by lovers of live classical music; for the latter, a plethora of venues, ensembles and musical genres suddenly emerge from a languorous summer. Witness the season openers of the Festival City Symphony, Fine Arts Quartet and Frankly Music.
The Festival City Symphony’s first concert, “American Celebration,” takes place Sunday, Sept. 13 at the Pabst Theater. Charles Ives’ unique and ingenious compositional voice was heard early in his life, hence his Variations on ‘America’ for organ solo. But, as with Maurice Ravel’s Boléro and Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, an orchestration of the work by someone else became more famous and successful; for Ives it was William Schuman’s imaginative 1963 orchestration of the variations that did the trick. Schuman’s own New England Triptych (1956) paid homage to an even earlier American composer, William Billings (1746-1800), not via variations but, as Schuman put it, “a fusion of styles and musical language.” Frederick Delius (1862-1934) was English, but as a young man composed as evocative and sensitive a musical landscape painting as conceivable in his Florida Suite.
Sept. 13 also witnesses the Fine Arts Quartet at UW-Milwaukee’s Helene Zelazo Center. On the program is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s famous Dissonant String Quartet No. 19 in C Major, K. 465, so-called given its ominous-sounding adagio opening. Chamber music aficionado Wilhelm Altmann described Alexander Glazunov’s colorful and strongly Russian String Quintet in A Major, Op. 39 as “a treasure, always a pleasure to play and to hear” (guest cellist Denis Brott joins in for this work). Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943), undoubted master of the piano, struggled in other genres. He made two abortive attempts at the quartet—the extant parts of his String Quartet No. 1 make us wish he’d finished his homework.
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Finally, Frankly Music honors two German giants in their opener at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church on Monday, Sept. 14. The Baroque master J. S. Bach is represented by his famous Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G Major, BWV 1048, the amazing Chaconne from the Partita for Violin No. 2 (a piece Yehudi Menuhin called “the greatest structure for solo violin that exists”), and excerpts from the monumental Art of the Fugue. The other master is Johannes Brahms via his sonorous, Hungarian-tinged String Quintet No. 2 in G Major, Op. 111 of 1890.
