Sacred and the Profane
Harpist Bridget Kibbey and the Calidore Quartet team up to share tales of love, death, and the macabre...Witness the harp's dramatic entrance to the concert stage via masterworks from 19th Century France....the French Belle Époque!
With virtuosic sweeps, opulent arpeggiations, to the most intimate sonorities, Bridget Kibbey and the Calidore Quartet team up to share tales of love, death, and the macabre via masters of color: Claude Debussy, Gabriel Fauré, André Caplet, and Maurice Ravel. From behind the harp, and behind the microphone, Kibbey illiterates how Debussy changed the way we hear harmony, how Fauré and Caplet were watching and responding...and how the harp turns itself from the most sacred of personas...to the harbinger death... via Edgar Allen Poe’s infamous story, the Mask of the Red Death. The Calidore Quartet brings their signature sound and virtuosity to Debussy's String Quartet, one of chamber music's masterpieces. Kibbey performs Sacred and the Profane this season and next at the Philly Chamber Music Society, Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival, Caramoor, selections at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Cleveland ChamberFest, Toronto’s Koerner Hall, among others.
Program
Saint-Saëns Fantaisie for Violin and Harp
Debussy Danses Sacrée et Profane (Quartet/Kibbey)
Debussy 1st Arabesque, trans. KIbbey (Kibbey)
Debussy Prelude, from Suite Bergemasque, trans. Kibbey (Kibbey)
Fauré Une Chatelaine en sa tour (Kibbey)
Ravel String Quartet (Quartet)
Caplet Mask of the Red Death, after Edgar Allen Poe (Kibbey/Quartet)
Announcing the Sebastian Currier World-Premiere Quintet for harp and string quartet, a modern colorist influenced by the French masters.
Artist Collaborators: The Calidore Quartet or the Escher Quartet
Acclaim
"...As performance, it was pure punk rock."
-New York Music Daily
"Harpist-slash-Rockstar Bridget Kibbey brought a haunting program to the catacombs, accompanied by a crack team of top-shelf string players. Together, they performed epic music that hovers in the shadows between darkness and light, from Debussy’s Sacred and Profane dances, to Bach’s haunting Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, to the grand finale: André Caplet’s gripping Conte Fantastique. After experiencing this show, we can tell you that the harp does not equal angelic!”
-New York Events
"Yet it is Kibbey who treats us to all the possibilities of her harp, part piano, part orchestra, but in her hands, always an instrument of great mystery and beauty." "The audience was treated to another special evening, unexpected, thrilling and satisfying. This is what live classical music can be. Listening to Kibbey, the harp converts listeners.”
-Berkshire Fine Arts
