Event

A Far Cry in Portland

In this program, A Far Cry explores the complicated relationship between the individual and the collective. The 17th century Italian violinist and composer Arcangelo Corelli leads off the concert with Concerto Grosso opus 6 #9. Three soloists - two violinists and a cellist - indulge in improvised, virtuosic flights of fancy within the framework of a buoyant Baroque dance suite. This is the individual elevated by society, skimming along the crests of the wave created by the massed strings behind. Next, we turn to the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg's Holberg Suite. Writing some 150 years after Corelli's death, Grieg nevertheless drew inspiration from Corelli and the Baroque. The Holberg Suite is alternately exhilarating and heartfelt, and finishes with a mad dash of a hoedown, featuring the concertmaster. A Far Cry concludes the evening with another, very different concerto grosso: Bela Bartok's Divertimento for Strings. Written in 1939, the Divertimento is vintage Bartok, combining a modernist ear with his beloved Eastern-European folk songs. The outer movements are lively and varied and the middle movement is nocturnal and ominous, and throughout Bartok pits the principal players - the solo string quartet - against the rest, often in a back-and-forth tug of war for supremacy.

To learn more about A Far Cry, please read our recent feature article in the Boston Globe:

article
http://www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2008/04/11/no_conductors_need_apply/

slideshow
http://www.boston.com/ae/music/packages/afarcry/