Piedmont Chamber Music Festival

What we think of today as “classical music” is a tradition that originated in Western Europe, but later practitioners drew inspiration from outside of that cultural sphere. This concert highlights some of those influences, whether they are the flash of Mongolian horse hooves in Lei Liang’s Gobi Gloria, or the distinctly Andalusian sounds of Joaquín Turina’s lush Piano Quartet. The second half of the program presents gems in the Western tradition from outside the Classical period. Orlando Gibbons’s beautiful madrigals are exemplars of Renaissance polyphony, and 250 years later, we meet Brahms in the Romantic period, where he is labeled a conservative for holding fast to classical principles while his contemporaries sought to break down traditions in form and harmony.