We are excited to announce the Phillips Music 2019/20 Season. Throughout this season, we present special concerts that explore the rich connections between music and the visual arts, including several performances aligned with our fall exhibition Bonnard to Vuillard: The Intimate Poetry of Everyday Life—The Nabi Collection of Vicki and Roger Sant and our spring 2020 exhibition Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition, including a Leading International Composers concert featuring the music of George Lewis (March 1). Exciting debut performances include renowned German musicians Christian Tetzlaff, violin, and Lars Vogt, piano (October 20), the great Brazilian pianist Nelson Freire (April 5), and the iconoclastic American countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo (March 29). In more Phillips Music firsts, we present an interdisciplinary project called Stray Bird, which fuses contemporary dance by the New Chamber Ballet with music by composer Ursula Mamlok (February 16). Acclaimed American pianist Jonathan Bissperforms a mini-cycle of the Piano Sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven in celebration of the composer’s 250th anniversary (November 3, December 1, March 22). We also salute the great string quartet repertoire with performances by the Vision Quartet(November 17), St. Lawrence Quartet (January 16), Harlem Quartet (October 13), and Attacca Quartet (May 3).
We look forward to sharing in so much varied and exciting music with you this season.
CONCERT SCHEDULE
Concert sold out? Standby tickets may become available (credit card only) near the House entrance to the Music Room starting at 3:30 pm.
PostClassical Ensemble explores the parallels between Schoenberg’s development of non-tonal music and Kandinsky’s ethos of non-representational painting. The program also explores Schoenberg and Kurt Weill’s experience as émigré composers in the US through their musical responses to Pearl Harbor.
PostClassical Ensemble examines the transformation of black spirituals into songs for the white concert stage through the musical adaptations and arrangements by composer Harry Burleigh. Readings of W.E.B Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Thurston explore the tensions and questions of the fate of the spiritual in the context of the Harlem Renaissance.
Join us for a pre-season event featuring cellist Seth Parker Woods in conjunction with the exhibition The Warmth of Other Suns: Stories of Global Displacement. Parker Woods will perform a new work inspired by Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series by Nathalie Joachim, co-commissioned by The Phillips Collection and The Seattle Symphony.
The opening Sunday Concert of the 2019/20 season brings together Cuban musical phenomenon and 14–time Grammy award-winner Paquito D’Rivera with the versatile Harlem Quartet. Expect a genre defying collaboration that mixes musical styles and blurs boundaries.
Acclaimed Beethoven interpreter Jonathan Biss returns to the Phillips for a three-concert exploration of selected piano sonatas, beginning with works from the early period of Beethoven’s output.
As part of the exhibition Bonnard to Vuillard: The Intimate Poetry of Everyday Life—The Nabi Collection of Vicki and Roger Sant, Soprano Axelle Fanyo, pianist Bénédicte Jourdois, and pianist George Fu explore the origins of the symbolist aesthetics of the Nabi painters through music inspired by the movement’s literary progenitors: poets Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé.
For the second installment in his exploration of the Piano Sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven, Jonathan Biss turns to Sonatas of Beethoven’s “middle period.”
2018 Avery Fisher grant winning violinist Francisco Fullana and pianist Tomomi Sato explore the influence of symbolism in music as part of the exhibition Bonnard To Vuillard, The Intimate Poetry of Everyday Life: The Nabi Collection of Vicki and Roger Sant.
The Claremont Trio returns to the Phillips for a program of all-female composers featuring works by Gabriela Lena Frank, Helen Grime, Kati Agócs, and Fanny Mendelssohn.
In partnership with the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel in Brussels, the Hermès Quartet, violinist Kerson Leong, andpianist Jonathan Fournel explore connections between music and the visual arts as part of the exhibition Bonnard To Vuillard, The Intimate Poetry of Everyday Life: The Nabi Collection of Vicki and Roger Sant.
Baritone Roderick Williams, pianist Julius Drake, and actor Alastair Boag perform Brahms’s song cycle, Die schöne Magelone, Op. 33, 15 romances from Ludwig Tieck’s novella, The Wonderous Romance of Magelone the Fair and Peter, Count of Provence.
Celebrating their 30th anniversary, The St. Lawrence String Quartet make their Phillips debut with works by Joseph Haydn, Osvaldo Golijov, and John Adams.
Harpist Bridget Kibbey and violinist Alexi Kenney make their return to the Phillips for an intimate and virtuosic collaboration. They will perform adaptations of the music of John Dowland, J. S. Bach, Camille Saint-Saëns, and Sebastian Currier.
The New Chamber Ballet and an ensemble of leading musicians take us on a sonic and visual journey through Ursula Mamlok’s delicate, abstract music revealing powerful themes of loss, displacement, rejection, and reconciliation.
The New Chamber Ballet and an ensemble of leading musicians take us on a sonic and visual journey through Ursula Mamlok’s delicate, abstract music revealing powerful themes of loss, displacement, rejection, and reconciliation.
As a musical preview to the exhibition Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition, celebrated pianist and composer Aaron Diehl weaves between jazz and classical styles as he explores the cross-pollination between musical forms.
The 2019/20 season of Leading International Composers will feature Ensemble Dal Niente performing the work of the iconoclastic American composer George Lewis.
Singers from the Washington National Opera's Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist Program and Program Director Robert Ainsley present an evening of art song engaging with the exhibition Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition.
In the final installment of his exploration of the Piano Sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven, Jonathan Biss turns his attention to the composer’s monumental triptych: the final three sonatas of Op. 109, Op. 110, and Op. 111.
Countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo makes his Phillips debut with pianist Bryan Wagorn. Their program juxtaposes old and new with works by Handel and Glass,Purcell and Britten, and new music by Gregory Spears.
For Nelson Freire’s Phillips debut, he presents an adroit program of music associated with his 60-year career, including works by Rachmaninoff, Brahms, Chopin, Mozart, and Zygmunt Stojowski.
Castles of our Skins present “In Black & White,” a program that responds to the exhibition Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition. Tracing a parallel musical line of enquiry into the exchange of visual aesthetics between 20th- and 21st-century African American artists and European modernists.
Two dynamic composer-performers known for their hybrid musical styles, Gabriel Kahane and Caroline Shaw join the brilliant Attacca Quartet for a special collaboration.
Singers from Wolf Trap Opera respond to works in the exhibition In and Out of the Garden: Pierre Bonnard and Jennifer Bartlett (on view June 27–September 20, 2020).
A music documentary about Olivier Messiaen’s transcendent masterpiece, that he composed in a World War II prison camp, and debuted there on January 15, 1941. This film was completed on the 75th Anniversary of that historic premiere, and features “The President’s Own” United States Marine Band Ensemble performing in rehearsal and at The Phillips Collection. Created by H. Paul Moon.
Some of the world's leading pianists have played The Phillips Collection's Steinway Concert D 542016, but they started hearing something wrong with it: the soundboard. This half-hour documentary—named for the spruce wood that replaced the soundboard—tells the story of tearing the piano apart and bringing it back to life. Along the way, we learn how a piano works and witness the consummate art of restoration by PianoCraft. Rising international star Olivier Cavé puts it to the test in this cinematic music documentary by filmmaker H. Paul Moon.
