Winterlude at Villa Terrace
What a great way to start Sunday: Abyssinian coffee, Rishi tea, pastries and live chamber music all in the Great Hall of the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum (2220 N. Terrace Ave.) on Milwaukee’s East Side. Villa Terrace is a historic house built in 1924 for the Lloyd R. Smith family, an Italian Renaissance-style home on a bluff above Lake Michigan. From the Great Hall in the center of the house you can look out over Lake Michigan, relax, and spend an hour or so listening to wonderful chamber music presented by some of the best classical musicians from Milwaukee (many are members of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra) and beyond.
The Winterlude Series of five concerts runs through March 2025. Yaniv Dinur founded the series in 2022 and serves as its artistic director. Born in Jerusalem, Yaniv plays and conducts all over the world. He’s currently the music director of the New Bedford Symphony Orchestra and former resident conductor of the Milwaukee Symphony. In April he returns to the Milwaukee Symphony as guest conductor. He’s passionate about chamber music and this summer founded the Milwaukee Chamber Music Festival hosted at the Charles Allis Museum, the Villa’s sister museum.
Both of these venues are perfect settings for chamber music. It’s possible to close your eyes and imagine you are nobility and the musicians are playing at your request. I wondered if Dinur ever felt something similar—as if he was the resident pianist in the Court of Prince Esterházy?
Ideal Setting
“The size and beauty of the room at Villa Terrace in which we perform sometimes makes you feel like that,” he answers. “This music was originally written to be performed in chambers—hence the term chamber music—so it’s the ideal setting to listen to it. Having the audience sitting so close around us makes it a really special and intimate experience.”
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The first composition on the program, performed by Dinur, MSO first associate Ccncertmaster Ilana Setapen, and MSO principal cellist Susan Babini, is Joseph Haydn’s Trio #45. It was published in 1797 while he was in England during his second “London visit” and dedicated to Therese Jansen Bartolozzi a famous pianist at that time. Haydn was employed by Esterházy for nearly 30 years, composing prolifically and performing regularly the whole time. His London visits took place after he was freed from his obligations to them.
“Haydn is famous for his sense of humor and surprises, and people who know me know that I like joking around,” Dinur says. “This piece pretends to be very polite and respectful. But every now and then, Haydn throws in a harmonic surprise so daring that it must have made his audience’s wigs stand on end.”
Ravel Trio
After a brief break they will conclude with Ravel’s Piano Trio. He started work on the trio in 1914. With the outbreak of WWI in August, he worked frantically to finish it over a five week period in order to enlist in the French army where he first served as a nurse’s aide. The coloring of the first movement is a reminder that Ravel’s mother was Basque. Indeed, the 8/8 time of the first movement is divided 3 – 2 – 3 the form of Basque themes Zazpiak Bat (lit. seven are one).
“The Ravel is a monstrous piece,” Dinur says. “It has incredible colors, fireworks, a waltz that gets out of control, a touching Passacaglia. It’s one of those all-encompassing works. Because Ravel is associated with Impressionism, we usually think of his music as elusive and dreamy. There is certainly some of that, but you can also hear the echoes of the war—violence and lament for an old world falling apart.”
Dinur resides in Milwaukee with his wife and two young daughters. “We love it here,” he says. “Our daughters were born here, the MSO became my second family, and, I know it sounds strange coming from an Israeli, but I really like the cold.”
Concert ticket also covers admission to the museum and its exhibits for the full day. Additional information about the museum, concerts, directions, and tickets can be found at villaterrace.org.
11 a.m., Sunday, Oct. 20 at Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum.
