To kick off Bridgehampton Chamber Music’s autumn series, the renowned Miro Quartet will take the stage on Saturday, the day after a performance at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall. The string quartet, which is based in Austin, Tex., has played for BCM a few times in the past, but not in the last 10 or so years.
“It’s always a fun community for us to come to,” John Largess, the violist in the ensemble, said last week.
The program begins with Franz Schubert’s “Quartettsatz” in C minor, a single movement that was undoubtedly intended to be the beginning of a four-movement quartet, but the remainder was never completed — echoing the story of his “Unfinished Symphony.”
“But in its seven minutes, it is a wonderful and marvelous single movement,” said Largess, and stylistically it bridges some of Schubert’s earlier works with his later ones.
The main piece on the program is the Quartet in G major, “which is Schubert’s last quartet, certainly his longest, and I think musically his greatest,” Largess said, “and his most expansive, adventurous, and daring exploration of the quartet form.”
It was written in July of 1826, and most likely the first movement was performed in the fall of 1826, so this year is a bicentennial of sorts. But the quartet was forgotten for decades, until Schubert’s brother Ferdinand discovered a pile of manuscripts in the attic and invited Robert Schumann and later Johannes Brahms to look through them. They discovered, among other things, both the “Quartettsatz” and the Quartet in G.
In between the two Schubert pieces will be “Entr’acte” by Caroline Shaw, an American composer, singer, and violinist whose works have been performed in the festival before, and who is the holder of the 2026-27 Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall.
“It has dissonances and it has a modern feel to it, but it is also written very resonantly and beautifully for the quartet,” Largess said. He added, with a tease in his voice, “She has invented some specific techniques, which maybe we shouldn’t give away.”
The second in the three-concert series, “Love Stories: Beethoven to Gershwin,” on Nov. 14, will welcome for the first time Susanna Phillips, an internationally acclaimed soprano who has sung with the Metropolitan Opera and has collaborated with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony.
Bridgehampton Chamber Music concerts are usually mostly instrumental, and rarely is there a singer, “so I’m really glad to bring a little spice to it,” Phillips said last week.
Also appearing on the Bridgehampton stage for the first time will be Yoonah Kim, a clarinetist. “The clarinet,” Phillips said, “is such a vocal-sounding instrument, so it will sound a lot like two voices together.”
“Zwei Gesange” by Johannes Brahms, originally scored for voice, viola, and piano, will be heard with the color of the clarinet rather than viola. The first song is “about a restless heart that is yearning for peace in a storm,” Phillips said, “and it has a telltale character that is driven by the bass in the piano, and long vocal lines.” The second one is a sacred lullaby to the infant Jesus.
A central piece on the program is by Michael Stephen Brown, a composer and pianist whose name this audience may remember from past concerts. When Brown and Phillips were students, they studied Schumann’s song cycle “Frauenliebe und Leben” (“A Woman’s Love and Life”), and a few years ago Brown decided to use that work as an inspiration for his new song cycle, “Love’s Lives Lost.” The two artists have performed it together a number of times since.
“It’s the story of a relationship between two people, and it’s very beautiful — what you see of a relationship that you cared about, from a distance, when time has passed,” Phillips explained.
Marya Martin, BCM’s founder and artistic director, spoke about her thoughts on having a vocalist on the program: “On this concert, she is like one of us, singing in just three pieces; she is like a chamber musician. It’s a combination of instruments that we’re working with through the concert.”
So to keep the timbre fresh, two works on the program are instrumental only: Schumann’s “Fantasiestucke” for cello and piano, and Beethoven’s Trio for Clarinet, Trio, and Piano.
Two Gershwin songs for voice, clarinet, and piano will round out the concert: “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” and “Our Love Is Here to Stay.” “They are really fun and whimsical,” Phillips said, “and were arranged for me by Rick Walters,” who did the editing for a series of books such as “Arias for Sopranos” “that every student has.”
On Dec. 12, German, French, and Italian chamber music will be heard in “A Baroque Celebration,” which seems to have become a holiday tradition. Along with Martin on flute, there will be Joshua Brown and Jennifer Frautschi on violin, Leland Ko on cello, and another artist who will appear with BCM for the first time, Sylvia Brown on harpsichord.
The festive music will consist of several pieces having various combinations of instruments: Johann Friedrich Fasch’s Sonata for Flute, Two Violins, Cello, and Harpsichord in B flat major; Vivaldi’s Sonata in C minor for Violin, Cello, and Harpsichord; Georg Philipp Telemann’s Flute Sonata in F major; Jean-Marie Leclair’s Sonata for Two Violins in E minor, and ending with Telemann’s Concerto for Flute, Two Violins, and Continuo in A minor.
This “was a wonderful, very fertile time in Baroque writing,” Martin said. “These pieces were all written around 1720 to 1750, about the time when string playing was exploding due to the fact that the makers of the stringed instruments were experimenting and making instruments that were superior to those of the previous periods. Coinciding with that is this eruption of incredibly virtuosic — and fun — music.”
The three Saturday concerts are at 5 p.m. at the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church. Tickets are $87.50, $62.50, or $52.50, and $12.50 for students, available at bcmf.org or by calling 631-537-6368.
