Photo credit: Shervin Lainez

This concert is sold out. Please contact The Knights at info@theknightsnyc.com to be added to the wait list.

The Knights return to Wethersfield Estate and Garden for a second year, sharing a program of music for strings, winds, harp and percussion that takes flight.

Birds are the original virtuoso musicians, sending out coded signals through their songs intended to affect a change in behavior of the listener (and perhaps, at times, just for “pleasure”). Recent studies have suggested that hearing “enjoyable music” lights up the same mesolimbic reward pathway for both human beings and birds. Music across cultures has often been inspired by either literal birdsong or the spiritual experience of uplift through sound and birds often symbolically represent guides to freedom. The program features songs and dances from a diverse group of composers, musical genres, and cultures, much of which either directly or indirectly take their cue from birds, butterflies, and other natural emblems of flight and the yearning for freedom.

The concert program will include:

Antonio Vivaldi: Flute Concerto in G minor, “La Notte”
Lili Boulanger: Nocturne
Jessie Montgomery: Rhapsody No. 2
Heitor Villa-Lobos: Song of the Black Swan
Maurice Ravel: Introduction and Allegro
Colin Jacobsen: Mirror for a Prince
Antonín Dvorák arr. C. Jacobsen: Songs My Mother Taught Me
Tommy Potts arr. C. Jacobsen: The Butterfly
Traditional arr. C. Jacobsen: Little Birdie
João Gilberto arr. C. Jacobsen: Undiu
C. Jacobsen and S. Aghaei: Ascending Bird