The first piece on today’s program falls into the category of “program music,” meaning that the notes follow a set “program” or story. And this music delivers: full of vigorous, rushing passages and endless motion, conjuring a storm-tossed ocean. Dvorak’s piano quintet, on the other hand, evokes many emotions without giving name to any of them. Actually his second quintet—he was reputedly dissatisfied with his first—the piece has won a place among the most-loved Romantic-era quintets, and it’s easy to hear why. Warm, lush melodies, colorful Eastern European elements and delicious rhythms—two against three, three against four—make it a great piece to sink your teeth into, even without a storyline. Recorded live in the Tapestry Room of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is pleased to share this concert under a Creative Commons Music Sharing License. For details see www.gardnermuseum.org.

This week on “The Concert,” we’re listening to pieces that reveal different sides of the composers who wrote them, music you might not expect. The meat of the program is Richard Strauss’s violin sonata in E-flat Major. This sonata, written at roughly the same time as the grand, well-loved orchestral “Don Juan,” contains that same sort of melody and lusciousness in miniature. Before the sonata, we’ll hear a newer piece, American composer Michael Tilson Thomas’s charming “Grace,” a jazzy song, intimate in scale, but full of affection. Written in honor of Leonard Bernstein’s 70 th Birthday, it seems a fitting homage to that great American composer, a lover of song. Recorded live in the Tapestry Room of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is pleased to share this concert under a Creative Commons Music Sharing License. For details see www.gardnermuseum.org.

This week on “The Concert,” we return to music by Bela Bartok and Julius Hemphill, listening to another set of 20 th century works based on folk music and blues. Less traditional in form, Bartók’s second sonata is in just two movements, rather than the standard three, the first movement full of Schoenbergian chromaticism and the second once again infused with folk dance rhythms. After the Bartók, we hear two pieces by Julius Hemphill, infused with the blues but incorporating classical as well as jazz instruments. Recorded live in the Tapestry Room of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is pleased to share this concert under a Creative Commons Music Sharing License. For details see www.gardnermuseum.org.

Most people have strong musical memories from their childhood: the songs their parents listened to, the music they grew up singing or playing. In this week’s episode, we’ll listen to two composers who took their early roots in music, Hungarian folk songs and the blues respectively, and jumped off to create compositions inspired by, but quite different from, their musical beginnings. Bartók was fascinated by Hungarian folk music, and spent much of his early compositional life collecting, transcribing and setting traditional folk songs. Hemphill was a real revolutionary as a saxophone player, known for his writing for saxophone quartet and, in this case, sextet. The blues tune here definitely has a foot in tradition, but it’s also audaciously modern. Recorded live in the Tapestry Room of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is pleased to share this concert under a Creative Commons Music Sharing License. For details see www.gardnermuseum.org.

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