Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night

Cellist Mina Fisher and the Bakken Trio will hold a discussion and give a performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklaerte Nacht (Transfigured Night) in the string sextet version. Prof. Michael Cherlin will illuminate Schoenberg’s notes, associating leitmotivs in the work with passages in the poem by Richard Dehmel that inspired it.

The Bakken Trio has a 30-year long history of performing great chamber music in the Twin Cities, first as the Bakken Quartet at the Bakken Museum of Electricity and currently performing at MacPhail Center for Music. Winners of the McKnight Fellowship for Artists, they have received awards from the Composers Forum as well.

The Trio’s February concert showcases music written by three great Viennese Late Romantic composers — Mahler, Strauss and Schoenberg — in their early years, honoring the rich legacy of music from the Habsburg Empire in conjunction with a huge exhibit of Habsburg art at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Michael Cherlin is Professor at the University of Minnesota School of Music. His dissertation was a study of Arnold Schoenberg’s opera Moses und Aron; his interest in Schoenberg has continued over the years and is reflected in scholarly publications and more significantly in his book Schoenberg’s Musical Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2007). His essay, “Schoenberg and the Tradition of Chamber Music for Strings,” is in the Cambridge Companion to Schoenberg (Cambridge University Press, 2010). His essay “Pierrot Lunaire as Lunar Nexus,” appeared in Music Analysis in 2012.

Pennsylvania native Mina Fisher joined the Minnesota Orchestra in 1979 after serving as Associate Principal Cello with the New Orleans Opera Orchestra and the National Symphony of Costa Rica. In October of 2010 Mina concluded her career with the orchestra, playing the final C Major chord of Brahms Symphony No. 1 under the baton of Conductor Laureate Stanislaw Skrowaczewski. An active teacher and coach, Mina studied under Janos Starker and Fritz Magg at Indiana University and with Andre Navarra at the Hochschule für Musik in Vienna. She currently manages and curates programs for the Bakken Trio.

More information here and here