GTMF’s final chamber program spans centuries – JH News&Guide
The Grand Teton Music Festival’s final Benoliel Chamber Music concert of 2026 mixes old, less old and new works for a finale that underscores the diverse interests and talents of its orchestra members.
Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer Caroline Shaw takes her cue from a moment in a 1799 string quartet by Haydn for her 2011 work “Entr’acte,” mashing baroque strains with sparsely modernist harmonies and puckish shifts in rhythm, tempo and tone for quartet she describes as “absurd, subtle [and] technicolor.”
Mozart’s 1782 Horn Quintet in E-flat Major, the composer’s only surviving chamber work for horn, features GTMF favorite Gail Williams and an unusual quartet of one violin, two violas and bass.
English composer Anna Clyne’s 2021 work “Strange Loops,” for string quartet and clarinet, friskily explores a concept proposed by cognitive and computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter in his 1997 tome “Gödel, Escher, Bach” and 2007’s “I am a Strange Loop,” in which he wrote, “In the end, we are self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages that are little miracles of self-reference.”
On her publisher Boosey and Hawkes’ site, Clyne describes her piece as consisting of “motifs and gestures that repeat, morph, modulate and recapitulate in various guises. At the heart of this piece is a sense of playfulness and yearning — inspired by the creative process in isolation.”
The final piece on this program is Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Piano Quintet in C minor,” written in 1903 when the composer was in his early 30s, making it one of his earliest major works. It finds him transitioning from the late romanticism of Brahms as taught at the Royal College of Music and his growing fascination with modal music.
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