BEAUTIFUL CHALLENGING

THE Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival launches its 2019 season on Sunday, July 14, with a concert highlighted by the New Mexico premiere of IF, a monodrama for soprano and ensemble by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Harbison. Works by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Schubert are also on the program, which will be repeated on Monday, July 15.

“The Chamber Music Festival’s relationship with John Harbison goes back decades,” says artistic director Marc Neikrug. “He’s now a composer of great stature, so when I found out we could join the group commissioning the score, we jumped at it. The text for IF is a German Romantic-era poem called If From the Distance, and it treats many of the same themes that Schubert addressed almost 200 years earlier in The Shepherd on the Rock for soprano, clarinet, and piano. That’s why we programmed them together.”

Soloist Sarah Shafer called the work beautifully challenging. “And it’s becoming more and more natural to sing as I work on it. There are lots of dramatic turns in the text, and they evoke a wide range of emotions. The Schubert is also a work for a solo singer. I think it’s his only successful opera. It has three scenes, with the clarinet playing an important role in each one. It goes from evoking my character’s past to intertwining with my current emotions to becoming the hope and joy that finally start to bubble up from my heart.”

The other works on the program reflect young composers finding their compositional voices.

Beethoven was a celebrated piano virtuoso by 1797, as well as an ambitious composer. The Trio for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano demonstrates his willingness to let the then newfangled clarinet come to the fore, with