For their 2024 Spring program, Counterpoint will present works by Brahms, Beethoven, and Bartok which mine the rich lode of European folk songs as inspiration for lively and sophisticated music for chamber vocal ensemble and piano. Johannes Brahms’s Zigeunerlieder sets translations of Romani poetry to Brahms’ own original music, similar to his beloved Liebeslieder Walzer but with even more passion and verve. Ludwig van Beethoven never visited the British Isles, but over a period of several years he set dozens of traditional Scottish songs for singers with piano trio accompaniment. Counterpoint’s Artistic Director Nathaniel G. Lew has arranged seventeen of these into a cycle encompassing love, warfare, soccer, and drinking, and ending with the familiar “Auld Lang Syne” on which the audience is invited to sing along! Hungarian composer and ethnomusicologist Bela Bartok’s Four Slovak Folk Songs probably uses songs that he himself collected, set with evocative piano accompaniments and modernist harmonies. These contrasting choral works are balanced by lyrical movements for solo piano by the most famous 19th-century German female composers, Fanny Hensel and Clara Schumann.

Counterpoint

Saturday, July 20th | 7:30p | Salisbury Congregational Church | Salisbury, VT