Summerfest | ​Week Four: An Invitation to the Dance

​In our final week, Summerfest invites you to tap your feet to music that dances. Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre’s Trio Sonata in G minor starts us off by demonstrating the composer’s amazing abilities as an improvisor. Trio sonatas were a new genre in France when she began performing them, so she felt free to break some of the rules to make the music go where she wanted it to. Fanny Mendelssohn similarly broke the rules as a female composer who was perhaps more Romantic in sentiment than her famous brother. Her String Quartet in E-flat is a bold work that builds from Beethoven’s essays in the genre to create a music at once deeply personal and wildly public in its emotions. Isabella Leonarda may not be a familiar name to you now, but after hearing her Sonata a 4 in D minor, Op. 16, No. 12, you’ll be a convert to music that Sebastien de Brossard described as “so beautiful, so gracious, so brilliant and at the same time so learned and so wise.” We end the week with Ralph’s Old Records, a biographical work by Portland-based composer Kenji Bunch. Bunch’s music is infused with the popular music and jazz he heard growing up, and this work celebrates his father’s record collection and the impact it made on his sonic world.