The 2023 Robert Mann Chamber Series continues with the “wonderful, selfless music-making” (The Times, London) of the Brentano String Quartet, Ensemble-in-Residence at the Yale School of Music. The program opens with Mozart’s intriguing “Hoffmeister” String Quartet, a chamber gem of character and complexity. Two touching memorial pieces by James MacMillan follow: his brief and delicate Memento and the miniature For Sonny, rife with pizzicato nursery rhymes and harmonies of shifting tones, composed to honor the memory of a friend’s grandson. It is fitting that Brentano ends their performance with one of the last and most profound pieces by Beethoven, since the Quartet takes its name from arts patron Antonie Brentano, believed to have been Beethoven’s mysterious “Immortal Beloved.”

The Robert Mann Chamber Music Series continues by highlighting musicians from the Festival’s own ranks. Britten’s Phantasy Quartet begins with a march and proceeds with lively pastoral charm. Poulenc is a composer known for his aesthetic of irrepressible good humor; he called his jaunty but complex Sextet “an homage to the wind instruments I have loved from the moment I began composing.” Brahms’ sophisticated Second String Sextet is rich with nostalgia, but sweeps all sadness away in its warm, bright finale.

The final concert of the 2023 Robert Mann Chamber Music Series highlights the Festival’s own musicians. Though it was composed on the early side of his career, Beethoven’s energetic String Trio in C Minor gives a decisive glimpse into the intensity of expression the composer would eventually be renowned for. In Debussy’s sparkling Danses — commissioned to showcase the rich capabilities of the harp — his first dance explores the ethereal (the “sacred”) and gradually becomes a swirling, earthly waltz (the “profane,” or secular). Dvořák composed his famous Second Piano Quintet during a happy period in his life; that contentment shines through in this treasured jewel of chamber repertoire.