Searsmont Composer Robert Sirota’s fourth annual Muzzy Ridge Concerts series brings two sets of artists to Maine for chamber music performances in Searsmont, presented over consecutive weekends in late August. 

On Aug. 24 and 25, the husband-and-wife Larsen-Choi Duo, cellist Benjamin Larsen and pianist Hyungjin Choi, will perform a program of music by Johannes Brahms, Sirota and Choi.

On Aug. 31 and Sept. 1, Gossamer Trio, featuring Grammy-nominated flutist Carol Wincenc, and New York Philharmonic principal harpist and Grammy-nominated Nancy Allen, and world-renowned cellist Claire Marie Solomon, entertains audiences with works by Théodore Dubois, William Healy, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Gabriel Fauré, Maurice Ravel and Béla Bartók. 

Each of the four concerts in the series will be held in the Searsmont, Maine studio of Muzzy Ridge Concerts founder and Artistic Director Robert Sirota, a creative sanctuary where he has composed a great deal of his work during the past 35 years.

Each program presented on Saturday will be repeated on the following day. All four 60-minute concerts, each with no intermission, will begin at 3 p.m. Indoor seating is limited to 50 people, with 20 outdoor seats also available just outside the studio on the studio patio and nearby lawn. Free parking is next to the studio.

The Larsen-Choi Duo program on Saturday, Aug. 24 and Sunday, Aug. 25 will include Brahms’ Cello Sonata No 2 from 1886 and Sirota’s Sonata No. 2 for Cello and Piano which was written for Larsen and Choi in 2018. Hyungjin Choi’s jazz improvisation will be very new.

Gossamer Trio’s program on Aug. 31 and Sept. 1 will showcase works of six composers who wrote between 1878 and 2020. Maurice Ravel’s “Après un Rêve” and Gabriel Fauré’s “Morceau de Concours” were composed before 1900 and Ravel’s “Sonatine en Trio” and the Théodore Dubois’ “Promenade Sentimentale” around 1905. Bartok’s “Romanian Folk Dances” are from 1915.

More recent compositions are “The Jet Whistle” from 1950 by Heitor Villa-Lobos and William Healy’s 2020 works “Folksong Suite” and “Sleepers Awake,” an arrangement of a work by Johann Sebastian Bach. 

During a career spanning five decades, composer and Muzzy Ridge Concerts Artistic Director Robert Sirota has developed a distinctive voice in his symphonic, choral, stage and chamber music. Music critic Allan Kozinn calls his musical language “personal and undogmatic. He follows his own internal musical compass.”

Sirota’s chamber works have been performed by dozens of ensembles including Alarm Will Sound, Yale Camerata, yMusic, Fischer Duo, and the Chiara, American, Telegraph, Ethel, Elmyr and Blair string quartets. His compositions have been performed by the Tanglewood, Aspen, Bowdoin and Cooperstown festivals. His works have been played by orchestras in Seattle, Vermont, Virginia, East Texas, New Haven, Oradea (Romania) and St. Petersburg (Russia), as well as by conservatory orchestras at Oberlin, Peabody, Manhattan School of Music, Toronto and Singapore. 

Sirota, now retired from academia, was president of Manhattan School of Music, Director of the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, Chairman of the New York University Department of Music and Performing Arts Professions and Director of Boston University’s School of Music.

He has received grants from the Guggenheim and Watson Foundations, Meet the Composer and the National Endowment for the Arts. His music is available on the Legacy Recordings, National Sawdust Tracks, Capstone, Albany New Voice, Gasparo and Crystal labels. 

Muzzy Ridge Concerts were launched in 2021. According to Sirota, “the series is committed to presenting intimate performances by world-class musicians.”

Past performers have included the Fischer Duo, Neave Trio, composer-pianist Nico Muhly, and flutist Carol Wincenc. Those “world-class musicians” have also included Sirota’s wife, organist-pianist Victoria Sirota, his daughter Nadia Sirota and son Jonah Sirota, both professional violists, and Jonah’s wife, oboist Regina (Gigi) Brady.