Bridgehampton Chamber Music welcomes spring with two concerts that offer a colorful departure from the festival’s usual soundscape, as well as one program in the time-honored trio format.
The rich, mellow, sonorous tones of four cellos will fill the hall on Saturday when the Galvin Cello Quartet takes the BCM stage for the first time. Since there isn’t much repertoire written specifically for this unusual combination, the quartet’s programming for this concert casts the standard canon in new arrangements, giving a fresh flavor to familiar classics.
This will be the case with Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” and Gershwin’s “Three Preludes,” as well as works by Mozart, Debussy, and Schumann.
The quartet has been adding to the repertoire for four cellos by commissioning new works that reflect the heritage of each of its members. For this concert, they will feature Andre Mehmari’s “Forrobodo,” reflecting the Brazilian heritage of one of its musicians, the cellist Luiz Fernando Venturelli.
“ ‘Forrobodo’ is a traditional Brazilian dance party,” Mr. Venturelli said last week, “so there is a lot of that flair, a lot of that dance rhythm going around throughout the piece. You hear a lot of traditional Brazilian instruments being quoted. There’s also a slower section that represents the rains of the Brazilian desert.”
In a standard string quartet, each player always plays the same part, whether violin 1, violin 2, viola, or cello, and each typically has its own range of pitches and its own characteristics. But that’s not necessarily the case in a cello quartet, where all four instruments are the same.
Haddon Kay, another member of the quartet, explained, “When we are learning a new piece, and figuring out who is playing which part, we’ll switch around” to find what works the best. “We are all individual players, we have different strengths, different interests in playing, so we can bring out a completely different sound — bringing the mission to life.”
Whereas solo performers often perform from memory, ensembles customarily play with the printed score in front of them. But not the Galvin Cello Quartet. Playing from memory may be an additional challenge for them, but it is an advantage for the concertgoers.
“That’s something we decided pretty early on,” Mr. Kay said, “as a way to interact not only with each other but with the audience. The music stands form a wall between us and the audience.”
For a totally different tonal palette, on April 18 two pianists will offer “A Gershwin Evening,” enlivening some of the familiar jazz-infused standards with a piano four-hands timbre. Michael Stephen Brown and Albert Cano Smit, two pianists and BCM veterans, will be featured in “An American in Paris,” “Three Preludes,” and “Rhapsody in Blue.”
There will also be the added piquant tone of the clarinet, played by Todd Palmer. Marya Martin, the founder and artistic director of Bridgehampton Chamber Music, said last week that she thought it would be enjoyable “to have a clarinetist walk up the aisle and actually do the very beginning clarinet glissando of ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’ ” as well as adding the unique sound of the clarinet elsewhere in the program.
For something new in this program, Mr. Brown, who is also a composer whose works have been played by BCM before, has been commissioned to compose a piece for piano four hands as an homage to Gershwin. It will be premiered at the April 18 concert.
Returning to a more customary chamber music format, three trios in various combinations of instruments will be performed on May 9 by Ms. Martin on flute, Stella Chen on violin, Clive Greensmith on cello, and Shai Wosner on piano. The two major pieces on the program are Haydn’s Piano Trio in E flat, and Brahms’s Piano Trio in B major.
Between those two is a Serenade in F minor for flute, cello, and piano by Robert Kahn, a somewhat less-well-known German composer bridging the 19th and 20th centuries. This one will be new to the musicians as well as the audience, as Ms. Martin said she just recently discovered it on an online database that has music scores in the public domain. She said she thought “it was fun to find these new pieces — so let’s do it!”
The three Saturday concerts are at 5 p.m. at the festival’s usual venue, the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church. Tickets are $77.50 or $52.50 for each concert, or by subscription, or $12.50 for students, available at bcmf.org or 631-537-6368.
