Vermont's Arioso Chamber Ensemble presents a premiere, "Six Curses and a Charm" by Carol Wood of Saxtons River, written for the group: Linda Radtke, alto: Alison Cerutti, piano, and Elizabeth Reid, viola. Also on the program, the Arpeggione sonata by Franz Schubert D821, two Brahms songs Op 91, and "Mirabeau Bridge," also by Wood.
Arioso's performances are:
Friday, Nov 4 at 7:30 pm, Richmond Free Library;
Saturday, Nov. 5 at 7:30 pm, Christ Church Montpelier;
Sunday, Nov. 6 at Saxtons River at Main Street Arts at 2:00 pm.
For the Richmond and Montpelier concerts, donations are solicited at the door, with a $20 suggested adult admission.
The composer first connected to the chamber ensemble through singer Linda Radtke, when Wood's"Saxtons River Suite" was premiered by members of the VSO and Counterpoint vocal ensemble in 2015. Wood then discovered the members of Arioso. "When I got to know their passionate and beautiful work, I knew that I wanted to try to write something for them. What I came up with was settings of two kinds of very old curses—"curse tablets" from the ancient world and book curses from the medieval period. The curse tablets are inscriptions written on lead and often thrown into springs or wells, usually cursing someone for theft or some other wrongdoing. She ends the set with another kind of medieval magic, an incantation to keep bees from flying away, written in Anglo-Saxon times and discovered in the margins of a book in the 11th century. Wood will show slides of the original tablets at each performance.