FREE

This virtual performance will premiere here on June 13 at 7pm. Visit https://youtu.be/wu_avlukJSw or press the play button in the video space below and the performance will premiere once available.

Mozart’s very first published works (at age seven!) were sonatas for keyboard “with violin accompaniment.” The keyboard was either a harpsichord (a plucked stringed instrument) or the new-fangled fortepiano, which evolved into our modern piano (percussion instruments). He continued to compose these duo sonatas throughout his life, and their development, into even-handed duos and into concerto-like challenges for both instruments, traces a remarkable vision of the rhetorical possibilities of the duo. The sonata presented in this concert was composed by the 18-year-old Mozart, shortly after the death of his mother. C.P.E. Bach — Johann Sebastian’s most successful son — composed prolifically for the duo, and the Fantasy being played on this concert is one of his most experimental works, harmonically. It is a late work, composed a year before his death, and he subtitled it “C.P.E. Bach’s Feelings.” Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint Georges was a mulatto violinist who distinguished himself in Paris and elsewhere as a musician and was actively involved in the French Revolution. Beethoven’s “Spring Sonata” is among his most popular chamber works. Its pastoral qualities and its symphonic structure have made it a lyrical favorite of violinists. 

Sylvia Berry on fortepiano; Daniel Stepner on violin