Bowdoin Music Festival concludes in early August

BRUNSWICK — The Bowdoin Music Festival welcomes Peter Serkin on Sunday, July 29. One of the most accomplished pianists alive today, Serkin has performed recitals across the world and collaborates frequently with premier orchestras, including recently the Boston, Chicago, American, Sydney and St. Louis symphonies, New York Philharmonic and Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Known for a career of ambitious commitment to new music, Serkin brings a classical palette to the festival, exploring Mozart’s keyboard sonatas and Schumann’s woodland scenes. The show is at 2 p.m. in Studzinski Recital Hall. Tickets are $45.

At 7:30 p.m. Monday, July 30, in Studzinski Recital Hall, the centerpiece of the Jupiter String Quartet’s program is a new work by Canadian composer Kati Agócs, recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a lifetime achievement award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The new work is framed by two canonical quartets that each stretched the genre in their own ways. Beethoven deconstructs the classical four-movement form, opting instead for a radically integrated work, motivically dense and contrapuntal. Debussy, on the other hand, preserves a more traditional structure for his only string quartet, exploring new textural and harmonic frontiers. Tickets are $45.

The night’s concert spans a vast emotional range on Wednesday, Aug. 1, from the protean levity of Schoenfield’s Café Music to Strauss’s intensely poignant Metamorphosen. Composed as World War II was drawing to a close in Germany, Metamorphosen is performed this evening in its original scoring for string septet. To set the tone for it all is the bucolic pastorale which opens Debussy’s late Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp, one of a set of sonatas Debussy was composing at the time of his death. The show starts at 7:30 p.m. in Studzinski Recital Hall; tickets are $45.

The festival season closes at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Aug. 3, in Crooker Theater, with characteristic panache, welcoming Itamar Zorman to the stage alongside the full festival orchestra. Zorman, winner of the 2011 International Tchaikovsky Competition and recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant, brings his touch to Dvo?ák’s innovative Violin Concerto, composed just as Dvo?ák was beginning to explore integrating traditional Slavonic music into his own work. Born in Tel-Aviv in 1985 to a family of musicians, Itamar Zorman began his violin studies at the age of 6 and plays on a 1734 Guarneri Del Jesù from the collection of Yehuda Zisapel. Tickets are $45.

The festival also features community concerts in new venues, including Rising Tide Brewing at 8 p.m. Saturday, July 28, and the Portland Museum of Art at 2 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 1, both in Portland. At community concerts festival students engage with audiences in non-traditional venues such as coastal resorts, libraries, community centers, care centers, museums and breweries. Through these opportunities students widen their reach and identify entrepreneurial ways to interact and grow through music. Concerts feature a variety of traditional classical repertoire and are typically 45 minutes in length.

Tickets for the festival may be ordered at the box office at 181 Park Row in Brunswick, over the phone at 207-373-1400, online or purchased at the door the night of the concert. For a complete schedule of festival events, ticket information, live streaming and to sign up for emailed program updates, visit bowdoinfestival.org.