Ariadne Daskalakis, director of the South Coast's Music from Land's End. Dorothee Falke photograph
Ariadne Daskalakis likes to bring good music to her local audience. Even if she now lives thousands of miles away from them.
Music from Land’s End, which Daskalakis directs, returns this summer for five performances in Wareham and in Marion. For Daskalakis, who grew up in Boston and summered in Wareham, where her family has a home, it’s a chance to entertain music lovers on her native turf.
“It’s our seventh season,” she says. “The majority of our audience returns every year, and we have a faithful following. Our concerts have been full, and enthusiastic.”
Fact is, Daskalakis now spends most of her time in Europe, where she teaches in Köln, Germany and directs another music festival in Italy. So even if this feels local to the violinist, the programs — and the musicians — have a distinctly international flair.
Concerts begin July 26 in an abbreviated string program at the Wareham Free Library, with violinist Riccardo Pesenti joining Daskalakis, violist Sebastian Gottschick and cellist Paige Riggs.
Subsequent programs will be on Saturdays (July 28 and Aug. 18) at the Marion Music Hall, and Sundays (July 29 and Aug. 19) at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Wareham.
There are two separate concert programs, one featuring modern works, another featuring Baroque music and instrumentation. Concerts in July include music of Haydn and Dvorak (the great “American” quartet), along with an unusually compiled work by Gottschick.
“It’s a collage,” Daskalakis said of the piece, which combines music of Ruth Crawford Seeger, Charles Ives and Carl Ruggles. “We’re calling it ‘American Quartet,’ which is a play on words with the Dvorak quartet. It’s a mix of works from composers who were unusual, and creative thinkers, all of whom struggled.
“All the works were written in a time when European music was in the mainstream, and the American voice was only being discovered.”
All three composers were linked personally — Daskalakis’s program notes cite fascinating letters to and from each of them about their music, usually about how difficult it was to find performances. Ruggles — who was born in Marion — in particular found it hard to get his thorny, dense compositions onto the performance stage.
The second program — for the August performances — will be much different. Music from Byrd, Purcell and Gibbons will be complemented by Gottschick’s adaptation of Bach’s “Musical Offering.” This music from the Baroque period will be performed on period instruments, and in that style.
Bach’s original “Musical Offering” is a masterful set of keyboard canons and fugues; Gottschick has recast the work for traverso (baroque flute, played by Emi Ferguson), harpsichord (Arthur Haas) and string ensemble.
Bach intentions for performance — and even the sequence of the “Musical Offering” — have never been completely understood, and Gottschick brings his own ideas to the work. He calls part of the work “Canon Puzzle,” and organizes the set in a new context.
“The piece can seem so fragmented,” Daskalakis says. “But Sebastian thinks there a satisfying arc to it, and he’s stitched together six of the canons.”
Other instrumentalists for the Baroque performances include Daskalakis and Seowon Kim on violins, violist Carly Scena, cellist Beiliang Zhu and viola da gambist Martha McGaughey.
“Initially my own career was all on modern violin,” Daskalakis says. “Since the late ’90s, I’ve worked on Baroque violin as well. I have a great respect for the Baroque players, and this is a wonderful assortment of musicians who have been in the forefront of period music performance practice.”
The Music from Land’s End Wareham season begins July 26 at the Wareham Free Library. Additional performances in Marion and Wareham will be July 28, 29 and Aug. 18, 19. Concerts are pay-as-you-can; suggested donation $25/$10 students. For more information visit www.mlewareham.org.