Pianist

The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (CMS) returns in December 2023 with Bach’s complete Brandenburg concertos, performed in their original instrumentation – each year in a different order with an evolving roster of the finest CMS musicians.

If Johann Sebastian Bach had only left the world his six Brandenburg Concertos, he would still reside in the pantheon of the great composers. One memorable tune is heard after another; uplifting energy abounds; feats of virtuosity for violins, violas, cellos, oboes, trumpet, horns, and harpsichord leap from the stage. With their novel instrumentation and irresistible energy, the six concertos are uplifting to all who hear them and have become an annual tradition at the Harris.

EPSG:4326

Brandenburg Concertos

Harris Theater

The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (CMS) returns to the Mondavi Center to perform Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, works that unfailingly provide spiritual fulfillment for music lovers of all faiths and beliefs, inspiring strength at year’s end and a vision of the brightest future. The artistic core of CMS is a multigenerational, dynamic repertory company comprised of an evolving and unparalleled roster of performers. Demonstrating the belief that the future of chamber music lies in engaging and expanding the audience, these expert chamber musicians draw more people to the genre than any other organization of its kind.

Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center

Robert and Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts

In response to the popularity of these events, a free ticket is required for all Prelude Performances and Koret Young Performers Concerts. Free tickets can be requested at will call beginning one hour prior to the start of each concert or reserved online in advance on the day of the event after 9:00 a.m. Seating is limited and by general admission. Learn more about how to reserve your free ticket.

Koret Young Performers Concert III

Menlo School Campus

CONCERT PROGRAM VI: Chamber Music Now

The artistic, political, and social explosions that began at the start of the twentieth century presaged one hundred years of turmoil, and composers realized that musical rules were no more. Variety abounded; no musical style dominated, and anyone could become an artist. This eclectic sampling of music from the most changeable era in world history was foreshadowed by Beethoven, whose creativity and artistic independence remained unmatched.

CONCERT PROGRAM V: The Turbulent Century

As the Romantic movement matured, music became more about art, nature, and experiences. The French rallied behind the sensuous music of their country following the Franco-Prussian War; Russians told sad tales from their vast and cold land; Bohemians mined the folk traditions of their countrymen; and composers such as Brahms shared their most personal thoughts with the world.

Concert Program IV: Romantic Twilight

Each weekday of the festival at 11:00 a.m., our “Mornings@Menlo” sessions feature either a master class with the Chamber Music Institute’s young artists, or a Café Conversation. The Institute’s master classes offer visitors the opportunity to witness the exchange between artist and apprentice, and culminate in the festival’s series of Prelude Performances and Koret Young Performers Concerts.

Master Class With Dmitri Atapine And Hyeyeon Park

A straight line leads from Bach, the musical monarch of the Baroque, to Beethoven, the composer who would reinvent the art in its entirety. Along the way, many composers made weighty contributions: Bach’s sons attained fame with more populist music; Haydn invented the symphony and string quartet; and virtually everything that Mozart created was of unearthly beauty. Riding on all this momentum, a youthful Beethoven broke from the starting gate, stunning the musical establishment with works of unimagined daring, invention, and excitement. 

Concert Program II: Bach To Beethoven

Music from the Baroque era stimulates the senses, lifts the spirits, and inspires faith in all things good. The evolution of everything in music—from the art of counterpoint to the invention of new forms—transformed Baroque composers into unstoppable creators as they experimented with new musical styles and combinations of instruments. In this opening concert, we’ll experience six trailblazing composers showing their skills in a colorful collection of instruments and ensembles.

Concert Program I: Baroque Splendor

Great works have been inspired not only by lofty ideals, but also by the colorful music composers heard played as entertainment outside the concert hall. Among the most mesmerizing performers heard by composers such as Joseph Haydn and Johannes Brahms were the itinerant Roma, whose musical skills combined almost supernatural virtuosity with visceral excitement. Later, before tragically perishing in a Nazi prison, Erwin Schulhoff composed stunning, eclectic music that drew on idioms from folk to jazz, and the Spanish virtuoso Pablo de Sarasate provided violinists with ideal vehicles for simply showing off. Music@Menlo’s twentieth season appropriately closes with Brahms’s first piano quartet, its Rondo alla Zingarese finale, perhaps the greatest chamber music crowd-pleaser of them all.

This concert is preceded by a free afternoon Koret Young Performers Concert (KYPC) at 12:30 p.m. by the 2022 Young Performers Program artists. KYPC programs will be announced in May.

CONCERT PROGRAM VIII Folk Spirit

Haydn is well-known for his 104 symphonies and 68 string quartets, but his piano trios supply equal delight for listeners and inspiring challenges for performers. In this program, we hear the direct effect of Haydn’s genius on Beethoven, as three familiar and formidable Music@Menlo musicians tackle a four-work juxtaposition of seminal trios by both composers. We will hear each composer’s trios evolve, as they did side by side in Vienna, where Haydn and Beethoven enjoyed a cordial if somewhat competitive relationship. Beethoven’s Ghost Trio concludes, its eerie slow movement reportedly inspired by the witches’ scene from Macbeth.

This concert is preceded by a free afternoon Koret Young Performers Concert (KYPC) at 12:30 p.m. by the 2022 Young Performers Program artists. KYPC programs will be announced in May.

Concert Program VII From Haydn

A Little Fun celebrates music’s power to express the depths of profundity and the height of absurdity in a program that unashamedly combines the sublime with the ridiculous. Well-behaved all the way to its conclusion, Joseph Haydn’s quartet nick-named The Joke plays a cunning prank on the audience, not to be revealed in advance! Jumping centuries, Charles Ives’s only piano trio combines transcendental serenity in its outer movements with the self-proclaimed outrageousness of its scherzo, titled TSIAJ (This Scherzo is a Joke). The twentieth-century Russians Alfred Schnittke and Dmitry Shostakovich supply potent doses of ironic humor, and Haydn gets the last word with a clever arrangement for chamber ensemble of his Surprise Symphony, so nicknamed on account of a single, outrageous note.

This concert is preceded by a free afternoon Prelude Performance at 5 p.m. by the 2022 International Program artists. Prelude programs will be announced in May.

CONCERT PROGRAM VI A Little Fun

Bestowing possibly the greatest music review in history, Joseph Haydn remarked to Leopold Mozart in 1785, “Before God and as an honest man, I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name.” In this program, you will hear the exact quartet by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart that inspired these words, preceded by one of Haydn’s finest works that inspired Mozart to dedicate quartets to the elder master. French composers Reynaldo Hahn, Paul Dukas, Vincent D’Indy, and Charles-Marie Widor contribute colorful homages to Haydn, for solo piano, written on the hundredth anniversary of his death. Concluding the concert is a bracing juxtaposition of the defining giants of Impressionism, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, bringing their mutual respect—and perhaps even rivalry—to life on stage.

This concert is preceded by a free afternoon Prelude Performance at 5 p.m. by the 2022 International Program artists. Prelude programs will be announced in May.

CONCERT PROGRAM V Admiration

During the eighteenth century, divertimentos and serenades lived up to their names as pleasant “diversions” and musical gestures of affection. Often performed outdoors, the clear timbres of wind instruments could be perfectly heard. Inspired by the examples of Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, composers that followed evolved a colorful tradition of chamber music for winds. Ludwig van Beethoven’s ingratiating Serenade, written for a unique ensemble combination, is essential listening for fans of the flute, and Béla Bartók’s bracing Contrasts, composed for the legendary bandleader Benny Goodman, thrills classical and jazz aficionados alike.

CONCERT PROGRAM II Wind Variations

During the eighteenth century, divertimentos and serenades lived up to their names as pleasant “diversions” and musical gestures of affection. Often performed outdoors, the clear timbres of wind instruments could be perfectly heard. Inspired by the examples of Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, composers that followed evolved a colorful tradition of chamber music for winds. Ludwig van Beethoven’s ingratiating Serenade, written for a unique ensemble combination, is essential listening for fans of the flute, and Béla Bartók’s bracing Contrasts, composed for the legendary bandleader Benny Goodman, thrills classical and jazz aficionados alike.

This concert is preceded by a free afternoon Prelude Performance at 5 p.m. by the 2022 International Program artists. Prelude programs will be announced in May.

Wind Variations 

The festival begins on a celebratory note, connecting Joseph Haydn, the father of the Classical style, with the Baroque era’s greatest master, Johann Sebastian Bach. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, son of Johann Sebastian, composed his dashing A major Cello Concerto only three years after his father’s death, setting a new standard of instrumental brilliance. In Haydn’s dramatic cantata, the heroine Ariadne is abandoned during the night on the island of Naxos by her lover Theseus, whom she had saved from the Minotaur. Haydn’s ever popular C major Violin Concerto follows, and the evening closes with Johann Sebastian Bach’s secular cantata Be still, stop chattering (in essence, a short comic opera), which tells the humorous, cautionary tale of a young woman addicted to coffee.

CONCERT PROGRAM I Concertos and Cantatas

Concert Program III begins with music by two of central Europe’s most distinct compositional voices. The program begins with Leoš Janá&ccaron;ek’s haunting Violin Sonata, followed by the riveting Sonata for Solo Cello by György Ligeti. These preface a beloved work by one of Western music’s most hallowed masters: Johannes Brahms’s String Sextet in B-flat, composed in his twenty-seventh year, rings with a grand sonority, affirming what Robert Schumann heard in the young Brahms’s chamber writing as “veiled symphonies.”

Concert Program III

Concert Program II brings together three works that contrast brooding tempers with light, lyricism, and optimism. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Quartet in G minor, the first significant work of its kind, would inaugurate a rich repertoire tradition, nurtured in subsequent generations by Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, Antonín Dvorák, and many others. Franz Schubert’s sublime Fantasy in F minor likewise adopts a genre closely associated with Mozart–four-hand piano–but which the Prince of Song makes unmistakably his own. The program concludes with the mesmerizing Piano Trio in F-sharp minor by the twentieth-century Armenian composer Arno Babajanian.

Hyeyeon Park

Pianist

Events

Dec 13, 2023

Brandenburg Concertos · Harris Theater

Dec 10, 2023

Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center · Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts

Aug 5, 2023

Koret Young Performers Concert III · Music@Menlo

Aug 5, 2023

CONCERT PROGRAM VI: Chamber Music Now · Music@Menlo

Jul 30, 2023

CONCERT PROGRAM V: The Turbulent Century · Music@Menlo

About

Hyeyeon Park hasn't added a bio