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Winterlude rehearsal at the Villa Terrace Art Museum
L to R: Elizabeth Breslin, Susan Babini and Ilana Setapen rehearse for Winterlude at the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum in Milwaukee
What a wonderful way to start a Sunday morning: Abyssinian coffee, Rishi tea, pastries, and, in the Great Hall of the Villa Terrace Museum & Gardens, live chamber music. 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 at Lake Michigan, relax and spend an hour or so listening to wonderful music presented by Yaniv Dinur and musicians from the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra.
The quartet consists of Yaniv Dinur, piano, former resident conductor of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and currently music director of the New Bedford and Tallahassee symphonies; and MSO musicians Ilana Setapen, violin; Elizabeth Breslin, viola; and Susan Babini, cello.
Dinur created the Winterlude concert series at Villa Terrace three years ago. “I just wanted to play chamber music with my friends,” he says. The series became so popular that Villa Terrace had to turn people away on concert days. But last summer, Dinur added the Tallahassee Symphony music directorship to his plate and let Villa Terrace know that he needed to take a hiatus from Winterlude. “I was so sad to do it,” he recalls, “but with all my travels, I realized I wouldn’t have the time.” Then, a couple of months ago, Villa Terrace called. “They said that people were missing Winterlude and asked me if I could do at least one concert this season. How could I say no?”
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Delightful Program
The program Sunday is especially delightful, two quartets chosen is if to cheer us up in the middle of the winter, an interlude to lift our spirits and help us forget these stressful times. It begins with Mozart’s Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor, K. 478, composed in 1785 on commission from the music publisher Franz Anton Hoffmeister. It was found to be too difficult for amateurs and the commission for subsequent quartets was withdrawn. In the hands of this quartet you will wonder what the problem was. The quartet is an example of Mozart at his best: exciting, flowing, and ever delightful.
After a brief intermission, the quartet will play Gabriel Fauré’s Piano Quartet No. 1, in C minor, Op. 15. Fauré began composing the quartet in 1876 while wooing Marianne Viardot. They became engaged and then the engagement was broken four months later. The quartet was completed in 1879. It’s a wonderfully romantic quartet in four movements. Fauré revised the Finale in 1883; the original Finale was lost or destroyed by the composer. One can only listen and wonder.
11 a.m. Sunday, Feb. 8 at Villa Terrace Museum & Gardens, 2220 N. Terrace Ave. Please note the concert ticket also covers admission to the museum and its exhibits for the full day and includes light refreshments. Be sure to mark your calendars for Milwaukee’s Third Summer Chamber Festival August 27, 28, and 30. Villa Terrace Museum & Gardens will once again host it.
For more information, visit www.villaterrace.org
