Project: Music Heals Us Returns to Guilford May 17

Project: Music Heals Us will present “Mix Tape #4: Back to the Future” on May 17 at St. George Catholic Church, located at 33 Whitfield Street, Guilford, CT. A PRE-CONCERT LECTURE with Dr. Luke Fleming will begin at 6PM and Young Artist Justin Green will perform at 6:45.

The program features Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s String Quintet No.1 in B-flat major, K.174, Osvald Golijov’s Tenebrae; and Felix Mendelssohn’s String Octet in E-flat major, Op. 20. The musicians performing will be Daniel Philips, violin; Tim Schwarz, violin; Carmit Zori, violin; Michelle Ross, violin; Molly Carr, viola; Luke Fleming, viola; Michael Katz, cello; Peter Wiley, cello.

Osvald Golijov writes, of his composition Tenebrae, "Tenebrae [w]as a consequence of witnessing two contrasting realities in a short period of time in September 2000. I was in Israel at the start of the new wave of violence that is still continuing today, and a week later I took my son to the new planetarium in New York, where we could see the Earth as a beautiful blue dot in space. I wanted to write a piece that could be listened to from different perspectives. That is, if one chooses to listen to it "from afar", the music would probably offer a "beautiful" surface but, from a metaphorically closer distance, one could hear that, beneath that surface, the music is full of pain. I lifted some of the haunting melismas from Couperin's Troisieme Leçon de Tenebrae, using them as sources for loops, and wrote new interludes between them, always within a pulsating, vibrating, aerial texture. The compositional challenge was to write music that would sound as an orbiting spaceship that never touches ground. After finishing the composition, I realized that Tenebrae could be heard as the slow, quiet reading of an illuminated medieval manuscript in which the appearances of the voice singing the letters of the Hebrew Alphabet (from Yod to Nun, as in Couperin) signal the beginning of new chapters, leading to the ending section, built around a single, repeated word: Jerusalem." (http://www.osvaldogolijov.com)

Felix Mendelssohn’s String Octet in E-flat major, Op. 20 was written in 1825 by the 16-year old composer and dedicated to his violin teacher. The piece, beloved by musicians as well as one of the composer’s favorites of his own oevre, makes use of the two combined string quartets to achieve orchestral as well as intimate effects. The third movement, a scherzo, was described by the composer’s sister, Fanny Mendelssohn, as evoking a passage from Geothe’s Faust.
The musicians featured on the May 17 concert are eight powerhouses of classical music and this concert is not to be missed. Their performance in Guilford follows a day of performing the same program in concerts for people imprisoned at Riker’s Island.

The Young Artist featured on this concert will be violinist and New Haven native Justin Green, who graduated in 2016 from Western Connecticut State University with a degree in Music after studying violin as a child at Neighborhood Music School and the summer Sphinx Performance Academy.

Tickets at the door: $20 adults/$5 students with all proceeds directly subsidizing additional “Healing Concerts” played in local nursing homes, hospitals, hospices, homeless shelters, and prisons. Project: Music Heals Us presents interactive classical music performances to diverse audiences by artists of the highest caliber in order to provide encouragement, education and healing, with a focus on elderly, disabled, rehabilitating, incarcerated and homeless populations. For more information please visit www.projectmusichealsus.com or email projectmusichealsus@gmail.com.