Danse macabre

About

Presented as part of La Jolla Music Society's SummerFest 2024 under the theme "Inside Stories," this concert explored narratives ranging from the intense to the whimsical. The program was curated to bridge ethereal themes with deeply moving compositions, anchored by the concert's title work, Saint-Saëns's Danse Macabre. The staging featured unique spatial elements for Thomas Adès's Catch, where the clarinetist began offstage, playing sustained tones before slowly processing up the aisle to join the trio on stage. This theatricality complemented Martin Butler's Dirty Beasts, a work based on Roald Dahl's poetry, which utilized a narrator (actor Danny Burstein) alongside a wind and piano ensemble to tell stories of animals taking revenge on humans. The evening concluded with Schubert's profound Death and the Maiden quartet. A pre-performance Prelude Concert at 6:30 PM featured the Abeo Quartet performing works by Schulhoff and Shostakovich, serving as an introduction to the main event.