poster for 2008 The Unfolding of Music II: Disc 5
× This final disc of the festival’s 2008 season presents a zesty potpourri of musical flavors. The delicious repartee between dueling violin virtuosi in Salamone Rossi’s Sonata sopra l’aria dei Ruggiero bespeaks the instrumental panache that defines the early Italian Baroque. Robert Schumann’s Opus 44 Piano Quintet exudes a dramatically different flair, befitting the exuberant abandon of nineteenth-century German Romanticism. The Impressionist language of Claude Debussy inhabits a singular musical plane, as distinctly heard in the Violin Sonata, the composer’s final work. Finally, among the festival season’s highlights was the West Coast premiere of selections from Songs of Cifar and the Sweet Sea, an ongoing cycle whose aesthetic reflects the multicultural heritage of one of today’s most innovative compositional voices, Gabriela Lena Frank.