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New Dumbarton Concerts Season

Dumbarton Concerts has announced its 2016-17 season featuring international and national touring artists as well as brilliant stars from close to home. The numbers of musicians on stage vary but excellence is the constant: the Poulenc Trio; the Calidore String Quartet, the Imani Wind Quintet; an a cappella sextet of Nordic Voices. The tradition of A Celtic Christmas continues with our area's Irish music masters Allison Hampton and Linn Barnes, while a new holiday tradition begins with Frédéric Yonnet & Friends. From jazz to ancient madrigals, from modern world music commissions to classic Beethoven and Brahms quartets, Dumbarton Concerts has chosen an exciting line up for its 39thseason.

“We are presenting the very finest local artists as well as outstanding international performing artists,” announced Dumbarton Concerts’s Managing/Artistic Director, Shelley Brown. “The 39th season encompasses works from a wide range of repertoire from rarely heard pieces to beloved favorites. To sit in the candlelit sanctuary of the Dumbarton United Methodist Church is to feel the spirit of its 166-year-old walls that have resonated and reflected thirty-eight years of chamber music concerts, and to realize there is no better place to hear the tones of an oboe, a cello, a gypsy guitar, or the human voice.”

The season opens October 15 with a program of Italian Madrigals from the mid-16th century to two 20th century commissioned pieces, by Morten Lauridsen and Jacob Druckman performed by an ensemble of one of DC’s most enduring and acclaimed musical organizations, the Choral Arts Chamber Singers. Next, the New Zealand String Quartet with guest Violist Maria Lambros performs works by Haydn, Brahms and a rarely performed piece by New Zealand composer and ethnomusicologist Jack Body on November 5. His work, Three Transcriptions, began with his own field recordings of a Chinese jaw harp, a Madagascan zither tune, and music from a Bulgarian village band, which he then transposed for a quintet of two violins, two violas, and a cello. Join the Poulenc Trio for Spring Panache on May 6, 2017. Blending piano, bassoon, and oboe in “near effortless lightness and grace,” according to the Washington Post, their Dumbarton Concerts debut includes 19th and 20th century French works.

For more information and tickets, click here.