Token Creek Chamber Music Festival

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Rose Mary and John Harbison founded the Token Creek Music Festival on Rose Mary’s family farm.

The 33rd edition of the Token Creek Chamber Music Festival is titled “Twilight Etchings,” an introspective title that composer and co-artistic director John Harbison says reflects his interest in light and shadow as well as a nod to the last strains of the festival. That's particularly relevant as this will be the final fest in its current incarnation as a fall event series, with shows taking place at 4 p.m. on Sept. 4 and 10-11 and 7:30 p.m. on Sept. 7. Find ticket and program information at tokencreekfestival.org and read more in Sandy Tabachnick's season preview at isthmus.com.

media release:

To our cherished Token Creek family and friends,

This summer’s Token Creek Festival, Twilight Etchings, evokes a new coloration.

The festival takes place a little later than usual, beginning on Labor Day weekend rather than ending there. It also  represents our final season in the structure and format we’ve followed for the last thirty-three years, the schedule and framework you’ve come to expect from us over all that time, with concerts compressed into a two-week period to mark summer’s end,

The Token Creek Festival isn’t disappearing, but we’re actively exploring the next phase.

The Festival Barn will by no means fall silent: we can’t imagine the space without pairs or groups of musicians assembling to play Mozart or Ellington or Birtwistle or Bach. But we do imagine that, going forward, these will be spread throughout the year—intermittent, occasional happenings that are part of an informal afterglow as we transition to what’s next. And wherever we go from here, Token Creek will always be animated by what’s sustained us from the start: the lively transaction between Music, Players, and Listeners.

And so, in closing out our long-running traditional festival, our 2022 seasons brings together many strands that have marked the festival from its start: a brilliant piano concerto (Rachmaninoff), a comprehensive solo keyboard collection (Bach Goldberg), along with our long-running Haydn trio series, and the completion of the fourteen-segment Art of the Fugue tour.

We’ll also offer first performances of two new works: a song cycle based on recent poems of poet laureate Louise Glück, and new music for string quintet based on the evocative graphic imagination of Nona Hershey, one of our guests for this year’s Festival.

Pianists Robert Levin and Ya-Fei Chuang, stalwarts from the start, will be with us, along with welcome guests and our many cherished colleagues who make up the Token Creek Festival Ensemble.

With you we’ll join in celebrating our mutual explorations of recent years, all of it impossible without you: the essential public whose attention, curiosity, reaction, and persistence has animated and elevated the entire Token Creek adventure, where we hope you’ll continue to find an experience—artists, repertoire, spaces—not available anywhere else.

Do join us—again or for the first time, in person or virtually—for another sojourn at the creek.

with warm wishes,

John and Rose Mary Harbison, artistic directors

Program 1: Prelude & Fugue, Sunday Sept 4 @ 4pm:  Music of Bach, Mozart, Harbison, Birtwistle, & Haydn

John Harbison, piano | Rose Mary Harbison, violin | Karl Lavine, ‘cello | Karen Boe, piano

Program 2: Song, Wednesday Sept 7 @ 7:30pm: Two world premieres: music of John Harbison inspired by the art of Nona Hershey, the poems of Louise Glück. Along with music of Schubert and Fauré.

Kendra Colton, sopranol Kayo Iwama, piano

Program 3: Variations, Saturday Sept 10 @ 4:00pm: Bach’s monumental Goldberg Variations: Tonality, Architecture, Logic

Robert Levin, piano

Program 4: Finale, Sunday Sept 11 @ 4:00pm: A program anchored by Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 2 (arr two pianos)

Ya-Fei Chuang, piano; Robert Levin, piano

More on Sept. 7 program:

"Art song is pretty much an orphan in American concert life. It occupies a very small sector here, and is much more significant in England, France, or Germany.  While a few celebrated opera singers will occasionally perform art songs in recital, the presence of music for voice and piano in the concert world does not reflect the vast importance of this music in the work of the greatest composers. But we really do not know such composers as Fauré and Schubert without hearing their songs."  - John Harbison

On Wednesday, September 7, the Token Creek Festival is pleased to present an evening that focuses on music for the voice: songs by Fauré and Schubert, and the world premiere of a new cycle by John Harbison, on poems of Louise Glück. We welcome guest artists Kendra Colton, soprano and Kayo Iwama, piano.

Chanson d'Eve, by Gabriel Fauré

"Nothing equals the purity, the grandeur, the chastity of La chanson d’Ève, this Bonne chanson of the golden age."  —Vladimir Jankélévitch

Songs of Franz Schubert

Schubert’s songs, composed as many as a half dozen in a morning, are especially impressive to see in their original manuscript form, the initial single copies fully fleshed out, ready for performance and publication, all tempo and dynamic indications present in detail. This is all the more remarkable, realizing that most of them possessed at the time of their making only the most uncertain, modest prospects for performance and publication.  Nonetheless, Schubert's songs are unmatched for the richness they offer.  Schubert inflects his songs less with frequent delicate detail—unusual chords—but much more with re-imagined primary structural materials—major modes/minor modes, unusual changes of key, broad sectional divisions that define his narrative.  His harmony ranges from patches of stasis (unusual in his time) to rare, near out-of-control vertiginous turmoil.

At Token Creek we're pleased to offer three Schubert songs, selected for their essential connective narrative in our program.

Winter Journey (2022), by John Harbison  [WORLD PREMIERE]

Winter Journey

Winter Journey is a song cycle based on three poems from Louis Glück’s recent collection, Winter Recipes from the Collective.  "Common to the three poems is a varied farewell meditation-conversation between two sisters, both realistic and elegiac," says Harbison. "I wanted to find their melody and harmonize it as it unfolds."

The world premiere will be presented by soprano Kendra Colton & pianist Kayo Iwama on Wednesday, September 7.

The work also exists in a version for soprano and small ensemble, which Harbison created for the 50th anniversary of Collage New Music, under the direction of David Hoose. That version will premiere in Boston on October 16, 2022, with Kendra Colton, soprano  

Louise Glück

"It’s Glück’s abundant intellect, and deep feeling, that keeps pulling you back to her poems...Glück’s free verse is exacting and taut and rhetorically organized. Thematically, the mirepoix is composed of family, childhood, love, sex, death, nature, animals. Her classical allusions are deft. She is a serious poet of the appetites." —The New York TImes, Oct 8, 2020

Louise Glück was United States poet laureate in 2003 and 2004. She has won most of this country’s major poetry prizes. And in October 2020 she won the Nobel Prize for Literature. She is also a Cambridge neighbor of the Harbisons, and a dear friend.  

   "I first found Louise Glück’s poetry in 1975 when I bought The House on Marshland, which, like all of her succeeding books, I return to often.   In the twenty years that followed I felt like I was waiting for a kind of signal that I could engage with her words, and this came while working on my fifth symphony, where I needed her, as Euridice, to offer a counterforce, a rejoinder, to Miłosz’s Orpheus.  The feeling of close connection I felt in making that setting has evolved into many more engagements with her great poems, and a friendship with an artist whose instincts and bravery I completely trust."   - John Harbison

Winter Journey is the newest work in a growing catalog of pieces by John Harbison based on the poetry of Louise Glück. His settings include:

Symphony No. 5 (2007)  Movement III is a setting of “Relic," from Vita Nova  

The Seven Ages (2008) Six poems fromThe Seven Ages, for mezzo soprano & small ensemble  

Stand By Your Grievance (2009) A country-inspired ballad, for voice & piano or jazz combo

 Crossroads (2012) Three poems from A Village Life, for soprano & oboe with string quintet or string orchestra  

In the Early Evening (2019) Four poems from The House on the Marshland, for soprano or mezzo-soprano & piano

 Winter Journey (2022) Three poems from Glück's most recent collection, Winter Recipes from the Collective,

for voice & piano, or voice & small ensemble.

Also on Wednesday's program: Gallery Visit (2022), for viola & string quartet  [WORLD PREMIERE]

"Rose Mary Harbison and I have long known and cherished Nona Hershey’s prints, which we see in our own house and hers, at galleries, and reproduced elsewhere. When Nona showed us a print entitled Quartet, we agreed that it might suggest music..."  —John Harbison

Nona Hershey’s work is included in public collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Library of Congress, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Yale University Art Gallery, Minnesota Museum of Art, Crakow National Museum, and the Calcografia Nazionale, Rome. She has participated in over 200 Group Exhibitions internationally. Numerous solo exhibitions include those at Mary Ryan Gallery, New York; Dolan/Maxwell Gallery, Philadelphia; Galleria Il Ponte, Rome; Miller Block Gallery and Soprafina Gallery, Boston; and Schoolhouse Gallery, Provincetown. She has held artist residencies throughout the world, has taught in Rome and Tokyo, and for 25 years was Professor of Printmaking at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston.

Winter Journey and Gallery Visit will have their first performances on Wednesday, September 7, at 7:30pm at the Token Creek Festival Barn.