Banda Magda
Friday, October 14 at 8:00 pm 

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Led by Greek-born multi-instrumentalist, composer, arranger, and educator Magda Giannikou, Banda Magda will open the 2022-2023 season of Concerts from the Library of Congress, enchanting our audience with music from its new project, Seasons. This work is a tetralogy of albums dedicated to the cyclical and shifting beauty of the natural world. Through a collection of original music and re-imagined folk songs in Greek, English, Italian, Portuguese, French, and Japanese, Banda Magda will connect with the audience through this tribute to Nature: our source of life & endless inspiration.

Apollon Musagète Quartet
with Garrick Ohlsson, piano
Saturday, October 15 at 8:00 pm 

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“If Apollo had played the violin instead of the lyre, this is exactly how it would have sounded.” (Süddeutsche Zeitung)

The Apollon Musagète Quartet closes our opening weekend in dramatic fashion. The group’s repertoire includes the complete string quartets of Franz Schubert and a range of other composers, but the quartet maintains a special devotion to music by Polish composers including Chopin, Górecki, Panufnik, Palester, Penderecki, Lutosławski and Szymanowski. They have collaborated with a number of prominent artists, and are equally at home touring with Tori Amos or working with world-class pianists like Garrick Ohlsson. Ohlsson, known for his mastery of Chopin’s music and a vast array of concerti and music by other composers, joins Apollon Musagète for one of the great pieces of chamber music from the 20th century: Shostakovich’s piano quintet.

AMS Lecture | Mark Pottinger
"Concert Hall Acoustics and the Sonic Ideal in Early Twentieth-Century America: The Coolidge Auditorium (1925)”
Saturday, October 29 at 6:30 pm 

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Mark Pottinger reconstructs the listening soundscape that informed the design and patronage of a mid-1920s concert hall before the Golden Age of Radio: the Library’s acoustically superb Coolidge Auditorium. His lecture highlights the changing attitude toward acoustics, broadcast sound, and noise in twentieth-century America and concludes by addressing how listening to electroacoustic music throughout the century has impacted concert hall construction today.

Presented in cooperation with the American Musicological Society.

Curtis on Tour: Eric Owens, bass-baritone and Singers from the Curtis Opera Theatre
Founders Day Concert
Saturday, October 29 at 8:00 pm

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Acclaimed in major opera houses worldwide, bass-baritone Eric Owens brings a charming salon evening to the Library, joined by a quintet of exceptional young artists from the Curtis Institute. Their delightful Liederabend highlights manuscript treasures of art songs by Schubert, Brahms and others, drawn largely from the Library’s collections. At its heart are the lilting Brahms Neue Liebeslieder (New Love Songs), a beautiful group of waltzes for four solo voices and piano, four-hands that was an immediate hit in the composer’s day. Owens also offers a group of Brahms favorites that include "Meine Liebe ist grün" and "Von ewiger Liebe." And the artists make a bow to our founder, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, honoring her lifelong avocation as a composer by performing an art song very special to the occasion: “Thy soul hath snatched up mine,” from her 1901 cycle set to poetry by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.