Allschwilerstrasse, Herzog

PHOENIX performs Bach's Goldberg Variations in an outstanding arrangement for strings and continuo made by conductor Bernard Labadie.

Myrna Herzog is a well-known figure in the Early Music world, internationally praised as a viola da gamba performer, conductor and researcher in the field of viols. Her ground-braking articles on the Quinton, the English Division Viol, Stradivari's viols and viols in general have appeared in important journals (such as Early Music and the Galpin Society Journal) and books (The Italian Viola da Gamba; Across Centuries and Cultures); she is a contributor to the New Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians. She studied cello with Iberê Gomes Grosso, viola da gamba with Judith Davidoff and Wieland Kuijken, and was mentored in conducting by Doron Salomon.

Cellist Camille Thomas’ program of beautiful cello arrangements invites us to find hope amid uncertainty, to see light in the darkness. From Purcell’s grief-stricken “When I Am Laid in Earth” to Bruch’s yearning “Kol Nidrei” and Dvořák’s nostalgic “Songs My Mother Taught Me,” Thomas finds beauty deep within pain. But in Donizetti, she celebrates the power of love, in Wagner gentleness, and in Mozart steadfastness. Fazil Say’s 2017 Concerto for Cello and Orchestra, “Never Give Up”, a musical response to the terrorist attacks in Paris and Istanbul, is searing and often upsetting, cello flowing like tears, orchestra twisted, demented. Birds bring peace, at last, to a modern masterpiece that confronts anguish and distress with strength and optimism.

Aged 32, Mozart completed his three final symphonies in the space of a few months. Each is a musical miracle—operatic in scope, bursting with the composer’s most memorable tunes, and beautiful in its lightly worn complexity. Stylistically, they nudge music ever closer to the Romantic era of Beethoven, with strong emotions and variety of orchestral color. Ensemble Appassionato, made up of some of France’s best chamber musicians, approach them with this sense of theater, each phrase finely wrought and articulated. The tragic first movement to Symphony No. 40 has an inexorable drive, its Andante beautifully molded. The final, spectacular movement of the incredible “Jupiter” is pure adrenalin.