The Birch Festival at Tanglewood Saturday

May 9, 3pm | Lenox, MA

The Tanglewood Learning Institute's Birch Festival brings an afternoon program to Studio E at the Linde Center on May 9, built around the question: how do distinct voices with different histories and perspectives learn to build something together?

The Borromeo String Quartet anchors the program, opening with Florence Price's "Five Folk Songs in Counterpoint," where familiar melodies get passed between instruments and reshaped without losing their origins. Louis Moreau Gottschalk's "The Banjo" follows, a piece that says a lot about early American concert music in a short time. Gottschalk was a New Orleans virtuoso with a Creole mother and a Jewish father, and his work blends the concert stage with vernacular American sound in ways that still feel fresh.

The centerpiece is the Massachusetts premiere of a new work by Jonathan Leshnoff for violin and piano, written in response to George Washington's 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, in which Washington described religious freedom not as a matter of toleration but as a natural right. Massachusetts Poet Laureate Regie Gibson will read both the congregation's original letter to Washington and Washington's reply. The program closes with Chausson's Concerto in D for violin, piano, and string quartet, a long, generous piece that works precisely because it requires all six musicians to listen as much as they lead.

Performers include pianist Llewellyn Sánchez-Werner and violinist Yevgeny Kutik alongside the Borromeo Quartet and Gibson.

Studio E, Linde Center for Music and Learning, Tanglewood, 297 West St., Lenox, MA. Tickets at bso.org.