The final weekend of Aston Magna Music Festival’s 46th summer season brings J.S. Bach’s famous work, The Art of Fugue, to Brandeis, the Pioneer Valley and the Berkshires, July 19-21.
Unearthed from a private music collection in France in 1974, The Art of the Fugue “shook up the musicological world,” writes Aston Magna Artistic Director Daniel Stepner, an expert on Bach. The work has been the focus of vast speculation and interpretation by early music experts, and Stepner brings his own orchestration to Aston Magna’s final weekend of performances at Brandeis, the Pioneer Valley and the Berkshires.
In his Notes on the Program, Stepner writes of the piece: “Perhaps no other work in all of Western music makes more out of virtually nothing. More precisely, no work creates such a grand, many-faceted, truly awesome musical edifice out of the simplest of building blocks…. With repeated hearings, the attentive listener will recognize the transformed subject … Playing one or another of the lines in this work gives the player a sense of being inside Bach’s mind, a mind that seems to see every potential for variation and combination in the most basic of ideas.”
Performing next weekend are Stepner, baroque violin; Christopher Krueger, flute; Peter Sykes, harpsichord; Laura Jeppesen, viola da gamba; Stephen Hammer, baroque oboe, and Loretta O’Sullivan, baroque cello; Jason Fisher, viola.
The weekend schedule is as follows:
July 19, 7 p.m., Slosberg Music Center, Brandeis University, Waltham, Mass.; pre-concert talk at 6.
July 20, 7:30 p.m., Rhodes Arts Center, Northfield Mount Hermon School, Mount Hermon, Mass.; pre-concert talk at 6:30.
July 21, 8 p.m., Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center, Great Barrington, Mass.; pre-concert talk at 7.
14 Castle St., Great Barrington, Mass. 01230
Tickets for Brandeis ($40/$45) and Northfield Mount Hermon ($30) can be purchased online or by phone, 888-492-1283.
Tickets for the Mahaiwe can be purchased from the online, mahaiwe.org/AstonMagna2018, or by phone, 413-528-0100.
Discounts for students and patrons under 30.
Full program details: astonmagna.org