Get Ready for The Heavy Hitters

Up on the mountain — Music Mountain, that is — Beethoven makes a grand appearance with two of his string quartets played by the acclaimed Voxare Quartet out of New York City. The group, Emily Ondracek and Galina Zhdanova, violins; Erik Peterson, viola; and Adrian Daurov, cello, contrasts early and late works of Beethoven’s chamber canon, starting with the lively and popular Op. 18, No. 4 in C Minor. This is part of a set of six early quartets that show a rapid development of the composer’s style, still youthfully exuberant and accessible, but with growing intricacy. This piece in particular plays with sudden changes from minor to major keys, and delights in Beethoven’s love of syncopation. The closing work is the late Op. 130 in B-flat Major, a work of vast scope and enormous complexity. The Voxare will play it with Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge” (Great Fugue), Op. 133, as the final movement, according to the composer’s original intentions. This is the first time this version will be played at Music Mountain. Usually the work ends with the finale that Beethoven later substituted at the bidding of his publisher. In between these two works, flutist Eugenia Zukerman will join members of the quartet to play a transcription of the Schubert Violin Sonata in G Minor, Opus 137, No. 3, also a Music Mountain première. This should be a highlight of the Music Mountain season. The performance takes place Sunday, Aug. 14, at 3 pm in Gordon Hall at Music Mountain, Falls Village. Tickets are $30 at the door and can be ordered by calling (860) 824-7126 or online at www.musicmountain.org. And now we come to the 22nd annual Bard Music Festival, this year focusing on the Scandinavian composer Jean Sibelius and his world. Sibelius is most widely known, almost exclusively, for his seven symphonies and his symphonic tone poem “Finlandia,” a national evocation of his homeland that has been endlessly quoted in pop culture (it appears, for example, in the action movie “Die Hard 2”). The Bard festival gives music lovers a chance to explore Sibelius’s often contradictory legacy. He was a late-Romantic composer who lived well into the 20th century and eschewed modernist tendencies in music such as atonality. Yet he also wrote deeply personal and profound music — much more of it than is commonly believed — with a masterful use of the symphony orchestra. And he was and remains a cultural hero in his native Finland. Festival programs include several of the symphonies as well as a bracing diversity of lesser-known works. Contemporaries of Sibelius who influenced him or worked in a similar idiom, such as Strauss, Respighi, Grieg, and Delius will also be presented. The Bard Music Festival runs for two weekends: Aug. 12-14 and Aug. 19-21, at the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts and at Olin Hall on the Bard College campus. Tickets range from $25-$75. For tickets and information, call the Fisher Center box office at 845-758-7900 or go to www.fishercenter.bard.edu.