Les Delices Chamber Music Ensemble Concert

Overview

Les Délices

A Marvelous Wind Octet

“Moonlit Mozart” Performed February 28, 2027

Faye Spanos Concert Hall, Stockton, CA

Les Délices (pronounced Lay day-lease) is a fascinating wind octet founded by baroque oboist Debra Nagy in 2009. You will think differently about music and think differently about Mozart as you listen to “Moonlit Mozart”. Audiences across the U.S. have fallen in love with Les Délices’ elegant and thoughtful performances that stand “at the intersection of rediscovery and contemporary sensibility”.

When hearing Mozart’s Serenades for winds, the music is always magical and his orchestration is masterful…but to experience the clarity and strength of these pieces on Classical-era woodwinds is doubly powerful and extremely rare.

Despite their rarity today, wind octets were a relatively common ensemble in central Europe in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Evolved from military or civic ensembles, six- or eight-member wind bands offered an effective – and colorful – means to present many genres of music in virtually any setting. Known as Harmoniemusik, these ensembles were more portable than a full orchestra and their vibrant sound could be enjoyed indoors or outside. Soaring melodies were often split between first oboe and first clarinet, inner parts were covered by other winds and horns, bassoons would alternate between tenor solos and bustling bass lines, and a double bass often provided reinforcement on the low end.

The artists that will join us as Les Délices are Debra Nagy and Kathryn Montoya, oboes; Katherine Spencer and Maryse Legault, clarinets; Nate Udell and Sadie glass, horns; Stephanie Corwin and Nate Helgeson, bassoons; and Nate Chase, double bass. For Moonlit Mozart, acclaimed oboist and Les Délices Artistic Director Debra Nagy, brings together today's finest period-instrument woodwind players for an “undeniably uplifting” all-Mozart program that includes original 18th-century arrangements of selections from The Magic Flute and Don Giovanni plus Mozart’s transcendent Serenade in C minor (K388).

Les Délices will provide a rich, adventurous and rewarding chamber music concert presented by Stockton’s Friends of Chamber Music. Come enjoy the concert.

Tickets are $30 and are available in the lobby of Faye Spanos Concert Hall at UOP starting at 2:00 pm, 30 minutes before the concert. Students of any age are admitted free. The audience is invited to participate in a question and answer program with the artists in the concert hall following the concert.

Friends of Chamber Music concerts are presented in cooperation with the Pacific Conservatory of Music. For more information about the FOCM annual series, please call 559-786-8587 or visit www.chambermusicfriends.org. Delices is represented by Summerell Arts, 910-612-7301.