GILL — Northfield Mount Hermon School will host period-authentic performances of pieces by Bach, Mozart and others for the next three Fridays, July 6, 13 and 20. The concerts start at 7:30 p.m. in the Rhodes art Center. Tickets for all the concerts are $30.
The concerts are part of Aston Magna, a traveling summer music festival based in Great Barrington that specializes in recreating historical music using period instruments. This is the first year that Aston Magna has come to the Pioneer Valley.
Each concert will be preceded by a discussion session with the group’s artistic director Daniel Stepner at 6:30 p.m. Stepner will talk about the pieces on the program and have the musicians talk about the instruments they will use.
The first concert, Friday, will feature a selection of Brahms’ sonatas for piano and violin. The piano for the performance dates to 1869, making it contemporary with Brahms himself.
The concert on July 13 will feature a Beethoven septet, a Mozart quartet, and a trio by Bernhard Romberg. Romberg was a contemporary of Beethoven. Stepner said his music is romantic in its aesthetic, and “has a kind of yearning quality and a lyrical quality.”
On July 20, the concert will be a performance of Bach’s “Art of the Fugue” in a new orchestration by Stepner. The piece, a “massive collection of fugues by Bach on one simple theme,” Stepner said, was unfinished at the time of Bach’s death and its instrumentation was not specified.
“I think it makes a wonderful performance piece,” Stepner said. “It invites the listener into this incredible feeling of invention and great beauty, too. You get a sense of being in Bach’s mind, which is a great place to be.”
Stepner said that his orchestration is meant to “bring out the contours and lines” of the piece by using coloring it with different instruments so listeners can easily distinguish the different moving lines.