DATES

Aug 6 | 7:30pm | Loon Lake Jewish Center

Aug 7 | 7:30pm | Historic Saranac Lake Laboratory

Aug 8 | 10:30am | Saranac Lake Free Library

PROGRAM

Moonflower by Kate Caliendo

Quartet No. 1 by Charles Ives

Prelude: Allegro

Offertory: Adagio cantabile

Postlude: Allegro marziale

Sextet in E-flat by Ludwig van Beethoven

Allegro con brio

Adagio

Rondo: Allegro

The More Things Change by John Winn

Progress

Stasis

Times-People

MUSICIANS

Aaron Packard and Susanna Klein, violins

Catherine Beeson, viola

Stephanie Barrett, cello

Debra Sherrill and Jon Garland, horns

(Shown above in alphabetical order)

Learn more about the musicians here.

ABOUT THE PROGRAM

Moonflower by Kate Caliendo

Kate Caliendo is a French horn professional who enjoys a diverse musical career of symphonic playing, chamber music, recording, solo performance, teaching, and composition.

Caliendo composed Moonflower for solo horn on a commission from Debra Sherrill who premiered it in November 2025. Caliendo dedicated it to horn player Robert Hicks who had an affinity for the evening blooming fragrant plant. Caliendo uses a technique called stopped horn, where the performer opens and closes their hand inside the bell of the horn to change the tone and colors. This also represents the opening and closing of the moonflower blossom.

A typical performance lasts about 5 minutes.

Quartet No. 1 by Charles Ives

Prelude: Allegro

Offertory: Adagio cantabile

Postlude: Allegro marziale

Charles Edward Ives was an American modernist modernist composer of the very late 19th century into the early 20th century. Interestingly, Ives was also an actuary and successful businessman. Ives was among the earliest renowned American composers to achieve recognition on a global scale. His music was largely ignored during his early career, and many of his works went unperformed for many years, however later in life the quality of his music was publicly recognized through the efforts of contemporaries like Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison. In time he came to be regarded as an "American original" and one of, if not the, most influential composers of the modern age.

Like the Impressionists Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy, Ives was among the first composers to engage in a systematic program of experimental music with musical techniques including polytonality (music in 2 or more keys simultaneously), polyrhythm, tone clusters, aleatory (chance music), and the use of quarter tones. This experimentation foreshadowed many musical innovations that were later more widely adopted during the 20th and 21st centuries.

Sources of Ives's tonal imagery included hymn tunes and traditional songs. He also incorporated melodies of town bands at holiday parades, the fiddlers at Saturday night dances, patriotic songs, sentimental parlor ballads, and the melodies of Stephen Foster.

Ives composed String Quartet #1 in 1896 when he was a sophomore at Yale, studying with Horatio Parker. The quartet is subtitled "From the Salvation Army" and "A Revival Service" due to its origin as a collection of pieces for organ and strings originally played at a revival service, and based on gospel hymns. After arranging these for string quartet, Ives added a first movement chorale fugue written for Parker's counterpoint class to create a four-movement work. He later removed this movement as it was never intended to be part of the whole and feels very much like a prologue stuck in front of a different novel.

Loon Lake Live will be performing the original three movement work. A typical performance lasts about 20 minutes.

Sextet in E-flat by Ludwig van Beethoven

Allegro con brio

Adagio

Rondo: Allegro

Beethoven composed Sextet for Horns and String Quartet sometime in the mid 1790s for two french horns and string quartet. Not much is known about the origin of the work, but it was published in 1810 by Simrock Verlag, a company run by Beethoven's good buddy and horn player Simrock.

It is a jaunty fun thing with virtuosic horn writing and a beautiful slow movement which showcases the use of searing dissonance resolving to consonance, a trick of the Classical era which Beethoven later exploited to great advantage in the early Romantic era he helped shape and define.

The More Things Change by John Winn

Progress

Stasis

Times-People

John Winn will speak about his work in person! If you're curious, check out the recording on our new album here and scroll to the bottom of the page to find an interview with John about this piece as well as his string trio, Party Hopping.