BOOTHBAY — The DaPonte String Quartet final two concerts in “Scandalous Music Festival” will be played Sunday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. at Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, 132 Botanical Gardens Drive, with a dip into three centuries of music and musicians who shocked the public.
According to a news release, the festival features the works of Brahms, Schumann, Ravel, Rodgers and Hart, Schoenberg, Britten, Piazzolla, and even improvised pieces based on audience suggestions.
Brahms’s first Sextet was written for Agathe, a beautiful woman he’d fallen in love with. He proposed marriage and gave her an engagement ring, before unceremoniously ditching her. She was devastated. Many of Brahms’s friends dropped him over this scandalous behavior, which was unfortunately typical of him. He wrote Sextet No. 2 out of pure guilt, as a way of enshrining a love he couldn’t face.
One of the women Brahms may well have dallied with was virtuoso pianist Clara Schumann, whose husband Robert Schumann wrote the Piano Quintet for her to perform. Later in life, tired of being “Mr. Clara Schumann,” and perhaps tired of Clara’s attachment to Brahms, he panned her performance of it.
Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklaerte Nacht is based on a poem in which a woman confesses to her husband one cold night that she is pregnant by another man — a shocking idea in Victorian times. But the husband responds by forgiving her. He declares his love will “transfigure” the child into becoming theirs, whereupon magically the cold night suddenly becomes warm and bright.
Benjamin Britten’s score and poet W.H. Auden’s humorous lyrics for four jocular “Cabaret Songs” were inspired by the same louche Berlin sexual underworld and nightlife of the 1930s that inspired the musical Cabaret. Britten plundered the style of those cabaret songs, using the American songbook and jazz inflections.
In “Chansons Madecasses,” Maurice Ravel uses erotic love poetry by third-world poets — the racier the better — to point up what he considered the sexually-repressed prissiness of American high society. It caused a riot at its 1926 Washington premiere. Although it’s both tame by today’s standards and a gorgeous piece of music, it is still seldom performed here.
Indeed, Americans were easily scandalized. Several years later, on Broadway, Rogers and Hart’s Pal Joey was skewered by many critics. No doubt this had something to do with Hart’s lyrics describing Joey’s love affair in “Bewitched Bothered and Bewildered — “Horizontally speaking, he’s at his very best,” and “Vexed again, perplexed again, Thank God I can be oversexed again.” Shocking stuff for Americans in 1940.
The festival concludes with two unusual musical adventures. Even by today’s standards, the tango is considered a sensuous and provocative dance form. The Quartet will perform Four Tangoes by Argentinian composer Astor Piazzolla, who is credited with inventing the “Nuevo Tango” by infusing the traditional tango with jazz and other Western musical elements. That will be followed by a unique performance “improvisations on a scandalous theme” using subjects provided by the audience.
Four guest artists join the quartet: Jeffrey Goldberg, piano; Joshua Gordan, cello; Lila Brown, viola; and Karol Bennett, soprano.
For tickets or more information, call 633-4333 or visit www.DaPonte.org.
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