Sunday, June 5, 2022 3pm
All Saints Parish
1773 Beacon Street, Brookline, MA 02445

Please note that masks and proof of vaccination are required for all attendees over 12 years old; masks required for those under 12.

Tickets are $15 general admission, $10 for students and seniors, and free for children 12 & under.

Thea Musgrave - Song of the Enchanter

Thea Musgrave was born in Scotland in 1928 and she began her higher education at the University of Edinburgh. Known for the clarity of her invention, the skill of her orchestrations, and the power of her musical communication, Musgrave has consistently explored new means of projecting essentially dramatic situations in her music, frequently altering and extending the conventional boundaries of instrumental performance by physicalizing their musical and dramatic impact. Two major retrospectives in recent years have shown the immense diversity of her music: the BBC’s Total Immersion weekend in 2014 and the Stockholm International Composer Festival 2018, in which fifteen of her orchestral and chamber works in four concerts — the largest profile of her music to date. Musgrave has been featured at many other major festivals including as Edinburgh, Warsaw Autumn, Florence Maggio Musicale, Venice Biennale, Aldeburgh, Cheltenham and Zagreb. Musgrave has been the recipient of many notable awards including two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Ivors Classical Music Award 2018, and The Queen's Medal for Music. She was awarded a CBE on the Queen's New Year's Honour List in 2002.

Song of the Enchanter was composed in 1990 and it was commissioned by the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra. The work honored the 125th anniversary of Jean Sibelius’ birth. This is how the original program note reads: “It is based on an episode from the Kalevala, the great Finnish epic, where Väinämäinen, the hero-God, has fashioned a magical five-stringed instrument from the bones of a giant pike. Orpheus-like, he plays upon it and enchants the people. All listen and all weep, their hearts melted. Even Väinämäinen weeps and his tears ‘bigger than cranberries’ fall into the clear waters of the deep blue sea. A sea-bird dives down to retrieve his tears – they have ripened into pearls.”

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Flute Concerto No. 2 in D Major

Featuring Sooyun Kim

Mozart’s Flute Concerto No. 2 in D major is an adaptation of the original oboe concerto. Dutch flutist Ferdinand de Jean commissioned Mozart for four flute quartets and three flute concerti, of which Mozart only completed three quartets and one new flute concerto. Instead of creating a new second concerto, Mozart rearranged the oboe concerto he had written a year earlier as the second flute concerto, although with substantial changes for it to fit with what the composer deemed flute-like.

Praised as a “rare virtuoso of the flute” by Libération, flutist Sooyun Kim has established herself as one of the rare flute soloists in the classical music scene. Since her concerto debut with the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra at age ten, Sooyun Kim has enjoyed a flourishing career performing with orchestras around the world including the Bavarian Radio, Munich Philharmonic, Munich Chamber, and Boston Pops orchestras. She has been presented in recital series worldwide including the Millennium Stage at Kennedy Center and Seoul Arts Center. She was the first flutist to present a recital at the Louvre Museum’s “Concert a midi”.Recently Jisun was named winner of the Boston University’s Carnegie Hall Recital Competition. Other major competition wins have included 32nd James Pappoutsakis Memorial Flute Competition, the Boston Woodwind Society, New York International Artists Competition, Alexander & Buono International Competition, The Kiwanis Music Festival, Ontario Provincial Music Festival, and The National Music Festival of Canada.

A winner of the Georg Solti Foundation Career Grant, Ms. Kim has received numerous international awards and prizes including the third prize at the ARD International Flute Competition. She makes regular summer appearances at the Music@Menlo, Spoleto USA, Yellow Barn, Rockport, Olympic, and Chamber Music Northwest festivals. An alum of Bowers Program (formerly CMS TWO), she is an Artist Member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

Her special interest in interdisciplinary art led her to collaborate with many visual artists, dancers, and museums around the world such as Sol Lewitt, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and Glassmuseet Ebeltoft in Denmark. 

As an educator, she has given masterclasses and lectures around the world including the Cleveland Institute of Music, Mannes School of Music, Sibelius Academy in Finland and Seoul National University in Korea. She is currently on the faculty of Longy School of Music of Bard College and teaches summer courses at the Orford Musique. 

Ms.Kim studied at the New England Conservatory under tutelage of Paula Robison. In addition to her musical training, she studied Baroque Dance with Melinda Sullivan. Praised for her tone that “shone like bright jewel” (San Jose Examiner), Ms. Kim plays on a rare 18-karat gold flute specially made for her by Verne Q. Powell Flutes.

Dmitri Shostakovich - Symphony No.5 in D minor, Op. 47

Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was a Soviet-era Russian composer and pianist. He is regarded as one of the major composers of the 20th century and one of its most popular composers. Shostakovich achieved fame in the Soviet Union under the patronage of the Soviet chief of staff Mikhail Tukhachevsky, but later had a complex relationship with the government, from which he earned state awards and privileges.

Among his fifteen symphonies, written between 1925 and 1971, Shostakovich’s Fifth has often been deemed the most popular. The piece was written in response to government criticism in Pravda, formerly the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in which his music was characterized as “Chaos instead of Music.” Stalin had walked out of a performance of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and was furious. The article was menacing: “The inspiring quality of good music is [herein] sacrificed in favor of petty-bourgeois formalist celebration with pretense at originality by cheap clowning. This game may end badly.” The composer took this seriously.

To save himself, he withdrew his introspective Fourth Symphony from its premiere (not to be heard until 1961). Number 5 was written quickly, and completed on July 29, 1937. He later wrote that his Fifth Symphony was about “the suffering of man, and all-conquering optimism. I wanted to convey in the Symphony how, through a series of tragic conflicts of great turmoil, optimism asserts itself as a world view.” The symphony was considered an immediate success; Shostakovich was momentarily “in the clear” from attack, and he was reinstated as a composer of the people.