Outer Cape Chamber Music Festival // Season Closer: String Quintets

Doors open at 6pm, Concert begins at 6:30 | Advanced Tickets: $30 | Door Tickets: $35 | $15 for students and free for kids under 10 at the door

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Antonín Dvořák’s String Quintet in E-flat major, Op. 97, was composed during the summer of 1893 in Spillville, Iowa, a moment of reunion and longing crystallized into chamber music.

The work opens with a solo viola—Dvořák’s own instrument—introducing a pentatonic melody, and that single voice becomes the seed from which everything grows. The scherzo opens with rhythmic figures that evoke Native American drum patterns, which Dvořák encountered in Spillville, while its middle section brings a “broad, leisurely melody heard first in the viola…one of Dvořák’s most enchanting themes”—a melody some hear as rooted in the memory of American prairie. The quintet asks: what does it mean to be displaced, to listen, to transform what you hear into something that belongs to you?

Ralph Vaughan Williams posed a related question across the Atlantic. His Phantasy Quintet, composed in 1912, introduces “an arching pentatonic solo” in the viola—a melody drawn from English folk song, and the four movements are “played attacca,” sharing this thematic idea throughout. The viola’s “rich but haunting sound appealed to the composer (he played the instrument himself)”, and in the Scherzo, music sweeps along “in 7/4 time over a bubbling Holstian ostinato…marked by a rhythmic freedom associated with English madrigals”. Both composers let the viola speak first. Both listen to tradition—to folk memory, to what voices before them have sung—and ask what a single melody can become when treated with imagination and reverence. 

Program:

Jessica Meyer, A Passage Between Earth and Sky (2022)
Ralph Vaughan Williams, Phantasy Quintet (1912)
Antonin Dvorak, Quintet for Strings in E flat Major, Op. 97 (1893)

Artists:

Grant Houston and Yoonhee Lee, violins
Anna Griffis, and Ken Hamao, violas
Joseph Gotoff, cello

The Outer Cape Chamber Music Festival at PAAM brings world-class chamber music to Provincetown through an intimate concert series that uniquely integrates with the museum’s visual art exhibitions. Led by cellist Joseph Gotoff, the series features concerts over two weeks in early summer, performed by world-class musicians with ties to Cape Cod. Each concert is specifically curated to converse with the art on display at the museum.