Minnesota Orchestra : Chamber Series

4 Concerts

Chamber Music: REFLECTIONS

At a Glance

Minnesota Orchestra musicians come together in small ensembles to perform cherished classics and innovative new music on Sunday afternoons in the Target Atrium.

Did You Know?

Reflection on the past can create a spark that leads to great works of art, including these pieces for chamber ensembles by Du Yun, Dmitri Shostakovich, Jean Françaix and Johannes Brahms.
Tattooed in Snow, a work written in 2015 by New York-based composer Du Yun, explores the delicate art forms of sand and snow sculpture through the lens of a string quartet.
Yun was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Classical Composition in 2019 and was recently selected by The Washington Post as one of the top 35 female composers.
For his unique Trio for Violin, Horn and Piano, Brahms reflected on his own past and decided to write a piece that featured the three instruments that he himself knew how to play.
Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet earned him the State Stalin Prize in 1941, an award that came with one of the largest cash prizes in chamber music history at the time.

Program and Artists

YUN
Tattooed in Snow / 15 min

Hanna Landrum, violin
Emily Switzer, violin
Sam Bergman, viola
Silver Ainomäe, cello

SHOSTAKOVICH
Quintet for Piano and Strings / 32 min

Cecilia Belcher, violin
Rebecca Corruccini, violin
Megan Tam, viola
Beth Rapier, cello
Mary Jo Gothmann, piano

INTERMISSION / 20 min

FRANÇAIX
Divertissement for Bassoon and String Quintet / 15 min

Fei Xie, bassoon
Susie Park, violin
Sarah Grimes, violin
Rebecca Albers, viola
Silver Ainomäe, cello
Kristen Bruya, bass

BRAHMS
Trio for Violin, Horn and Piano / 35 min

David Brubaker, violin
Bruce Hudson, horn
Susan Billmeyer, piano

Accessibility at Orchestra Hall

Sun Apr 25 4:30pm

Chamber Music: CHARACTER

At a Glance

Minnesota Orchestra musicians come together in small ensembles to perform cherished classics and innovative new music on Sunday afternoons in the Auditorium.

Did You Know?

The final concert of the 2020-21 Chamber Music series teems with character and concludes with Louis Spohr’s Nonet, especially written to showcase the individual characters of its nine featured instruments.
Andrew Norman, a participant in the 2004 Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute, is a Grammy-nominated composer and a member of the faculty at the USC Thornton School of Music. Gran Turismo was inspired by the unlikely combination of Baroque string playing, Italian futurist art and a car-racing video game.
Façade began as an at-home project combining the artistic talents of British poet Edith Sitwell—whose poems were considered abstract, exotic and dramatic—and the young composer William Walton, who found himself “adopted” into the Sitwell family while studying at Oxford University.
A child prodigy, composer-pianist Jean Françaix began writing music at the age of ten and was mentored and championed from a very young age by two other French musical geniuses, Maurice Ravel and Nadia Boulanger.