Bohemian Blueprint

DIRECTOR'S NOTES

Bohemian Blueprint takes its title from two works on this program which features three living women composers. Stacy Garrop’s Bohemian Café is a wind quintet with bass in a popular style and Caroline Shaw’s Blueprint for string quartet, a rigorous and engaging tour de force.

We open with a string quartet by the eighteen century Afro-French composer Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, a contemporary of Mozart and virtuoso violinist, composer, and champion fencer.

We conclude with the early nineteenth century German composer Louis Spohr’s Nonet for a combination of strings and woodwind quintet. A contemporary of Beethoven, he wrote over 18 violin concerti, symphonies, operas, chamber works and did much to develop string technique in the early nineteenth century with over 200 students in his lifetime. The Nonet is a grand work with virtuoso writing for all the instruments.