“Joan” in Concert: The Music of Peter Schickele at Maverick

Date:

Sat, July 12, 2025

Time:

8:00 PM-10:00 PM

Smithsonian Folkways artist Elizabeth Mitchell returns to Maverick Saturday Nights for another celebration of the music of the late composer (and Woodstock resident) Peter Schickele.

This time she performs the 1967 Joan Baez album “Joan,” featuring orchestral arrangements by Schickele, who arranged and conducted three albums for Baez in the 1960s.

With songs by Paul Simon, Jacques Brel, Donovan, the Beatles, Tim Hardin and more, “Joan” is a haunting, timeless record, with rich arrangements blending brass, winds, strings, guitar, and percussion.

In bringing the album to life on the Maverick stage, Mitchell will be backed by a chamber pop/classical ensemble made up of area musicians, including Peter Schickele’s daughter, Karla Schickele, who is Mitchell’s bandmate in the indie rock group Ida.

Multi-Grammy-award-winner Peter Schickele, known as the creator of P.D.Q. Bach and host of the public radio program, “Schickele Mix,” passed away in 2024 at the age of 88. He composed more than 100 works for symphony orchestra, choral group, chamber ensemble, and voice.

Musician and activist Joan Baez has enjoyed an illustrious career as a singer, folk interpreter, songwriter, guitarist, and outspoken artist. In 2024, she published a book of poetry, When You See My Mother, Ask Her to Dance.

Joan was very much an album of its time in terms of its sound and production, more so than any other album that Joan Baez ever recorded. In 1967, rock, folk, folk-rock, and pop all seemed to be headed in new and ever-more-ornate directions, and Joan was a response to that change and, not coincidentally, is also the most self-consciously beautiful record that Baez ever cut. Arranger/conductor Peter Schickele, who had previously worked with Baez on her Christmas album, provides generally restrained orchestral accompaniment on ten of the 12 songs here. The latter, in sharp contrast to Baez’s earlier work, are mostly drawn from a wide range of such popular composers as John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Donovan, Paul Simon, and Jacques Brel, as well as Tim Hardin and Baez’s late brother-in-law, Richard Farina. Several of these tracks — “Turquoise” with its gorgeous parts for the harps and the horns, “Children of Darkness” with its beautiful writing for the reeds, and “Saigon Bride” with its haunting brass part — are profoundly beautiful….Additionally, Baez shows off the two earliest-published products of her career as a songwriter, in the form of “North” and “Saigon Bride,” the latter a particularly poignant anti-war song that expresses the futility of the Vietnam War.
-Bruce Eder, ALLMUSIC

Elizabeth Mitchell, vocals
Karla Schickele, vocals
Storey Littleton, vocals
Hai-Ting Chinn, vocals
Rose Thomson, bass
Emmet Schickele, piano
Daniel Littleton, guitar
Liri Ronen, french horn
Steve Bernstein, trumpet
Matt Bauder, clarinet
Kirsten Jacobson, flute
Jean Cook, violin
Karen Waltuch, violin
Noah Hoffeld, cello
Garry Kvistad, percussion