Like a shooting star, Franz Schubert blazed across music's sky for a brief 31 years, leaving behind over 1,000 works that transformed the Classical into the Romantic age.
Four programs spanning Schubert's creative career and variety of compositions offer a rich journey into one of music's most ethereal worlds. A fifth concert explores how the legacy of Schubert and composers in the two centuries following his death have re-worked and been inspired by his compositions.

EPSG:4326

Winter Festival: Into Eternity

Lincoln Center

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

Menlo School Campus

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.

Orion String Quartet

Jan 22, 2023

Winter Festival: Into Eternity

Jul 28, 2022

CONCERT PROGRAM VI A Little Fun

Orion String Quartet