A Far Cry is performing later this month at the Yellow Barn Music School and Festival in Putney, Vermont. The program is one of our West Coast Tour programs, and it is one I personally love. All three pieces feature soloists drawn from among the Criers. The individual spirit of the soloist, unashamed and uncompromising, is a great metaphor for A Far Cry itself, which was founded by musicians eager to make their own path. These pieces are the musical expression of this orchestra.
The 17th century Italian violinist and composer Arcangelo Corelli leads off the concert with Concerto Grosso opus 6 #9. Three soloists - two violinists and a cellist - indulge in improvised, virtuosic flights of fancy within the framework of a buoyant Baroque dance suite. This is the individual elevated by society, skimming along the crests of the wave created by the massed strings behind. Next, we turn to the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg's Holberg Suite. Writing some 150 years after Corelli's death, Grieg nevertheless drew inspiration from Corelli and the Baroque. The Holberg Suite is alternately exhilarating and heartfelt, and finishes with a mad dash of a hoedown, featuring the concertmaster. A Far Cry concludes the evening with another, very different concerto grosso: Bela Bartok's Divertimento for Strings. Written in 1939, the Divertimento is vintage Bartok, combining a modernist ear with his beloved Eastern-European folk songs. The outer movements are lively and varied and the middle movement is nocturnal and ominous, and throughout Bartok pits the principal players - the solo string quartet - against the rest, often in a back-and-forth tug of war for supremacy.
We hope those in southern Vermont will come to this concert! Tickets are available at Yellow Barn's website.
