Cal Performances at Home opens its season with a violin-piano recital by Tessa Lark and Andrew Armstrong on October 1 at 7pm PDT. The program includes:
BARTÓK (arr. Székely)
Romanian Folk Dances
YSAŸE
Sonata No. 5 for Solo Violin
SCHUBERT
Fantasy in C major, D. 934
GRIEG
Violin Sonata No. 3 in C minor
RAVEL
Tzigane
I had the pleasure of writing program notes for this performance, which can be found here. The stream was filmed exclusively for Cal Performances on location at Merkin Hall, Kaufman Music Center, New York City, on August 17, 2020. There will also be a pre-concert conversation with Tessa Lark and Cal Performances executive and artistic director Jeremy Geffen.
On Thursday, 10 September, at 6pm MT, Tippet Rise continues its monthly streaming series, Tippet Rise & Friends at Home, with a concert featuring the Escher String Quartet.
Their program includes Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Quartet in F major, K. 590 and the Adagio from Samuel Barber’s Quartet, Op. 11 (otherwise known as the “Adagio for Strings”).
[clip from the earlier incarnation of the James Ehnes Quartet, which launches Seattle’s Virtual Summer Festival this week]
The Seattle Chamber Music Society launches its Virtual Summer Festival this evening. This isn’t just a visit to the archives but a 12-concert series of all brand-new live performances that will be taped before being released to the public as streams.
The concerts will be made available on a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule at 7pm PST. These will be “on-demand”: in other words, you won’t have to view them at the specific streaming time but can access all concerts for which you have purchased a pass through 10 August 2020 — as many times as you like.
This is an experiment and a risk. How many will pay for internet performances, as opposed to free streams? Each concert costs $15, or you can purchase a pass to all 12 programs for $125. For the first time, SCMS’s Chamber Festival is thus available to anyone anywhere with internet access, and performances cannot be “sold out.”
I wrote about the planning that went into this approach for the Seattle Times.
Artistic Director James Ehnes and his quartet will perform part two of their complete Beethoven quartet cycle in the three concerts on offer this week. This continues and concludes the journey they began in January — under normal circumstances — at the shorter Winter Festival.
Meanwhile, Ehnes put his quarantine time to use at his home in Florida by recording the solo partitas and sonatas of J.S. Bach and the corresponding Ysaÿe sonatas. He will be releasing these in a series, starting here.
James Ehnes, Seattle Chamber Music Society artistic director, in the recording studio he set up while sequestered at his home near Tampa, Florida, where he just completed recording Bach’s solo violin Sonatas and Partitas. (Courtesy of Kate Ehnes)
Here’s my story about Seattle Chamber Music Society’s plan to go forward with its beloved, month-long Summer Festival with an online version.
Along with its terrible human toll, the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has ravaged the performing arts. Cancellation announcements are now so routine that the Seattle Chamber Music Society’s (SCMS) decision to proceed with a 2020 Summer Festival comes as a welcome respite…
This week brought the sad news that Lynn Harrell has died. He was only 76. Here are some “master class” observations on Beethoven’s Op. 104, no. 1 that the incomparable cellist shared with The Strad last year:
There is the most wonderful moment in the first movement of Sonata no.4, at the beginning of bar 94, where Beethoven writes in A major in the piano part and D minor for the cello. This lasts only for a moment, but for a Classical composer to have the concept that the two main poles of traditional harmony – the dominant and the tonic – could be played at the same time shows that he was starting to think in a way that might have led, if he had lived another 15–20 years, to a Schoenbergian breaking up of traditional harmony altogether. It’s just extraordinary.
The Cuarteto Quiroga and Jörg Widmann recently performed this fascinating program centered around music by Peter Eötvös inspired by James Joyce at the Boulez Boulez-Saal. My essay for the program is here.
The video above is from the recording of Eötvös’ Sirens Cycle by the Calder Quartet and soprano Audrey Luna, which is the origin piece for the new Joyce-inspired works for string quartet and clarinet.
Currently touring the West Coast, the Danish String Quartet paid a visit recently. I now get what the fuss is about. Here’s my review for Strings:
The Danish String Quartet‘s contribution to the Beethoven 250 celebrations this season includes a tripartite North American tour. As part of the fall segment of this tour, which is currently underway, the Scandinavian foursome made a recent stop in Seattle. On offer was the first of the Beethoven-themed programs they are presenting under the project name PRISM. The performance launched this season’s International Chamber Music series at the Meany Center for the Performing Arts of the University of Washington.
Congratulations to Richard O’Neill, who was just announced as the newest member of the marvelous Takács Quartet. When Geri Walther retires from the group at the end of May 2020, O’Neill will become the new violist.
Richard O’Neill has contributed invaluably to the success of the Seattle Chamber Music Society’s festivals and is always a joy to hear. I have a special affection for the Takács as well, as I was assigned one of their concerts for the very first professional review I wrote.
The 200th anniversary of Clara Schumann’s birth is quickly approaching. Here’s a story on her legacy I wrote for The New York Times:
Schumann is among the most celebrated names in the classical music canon — for most people conjuring the poetic and intense work of Robert Schumann, the Romantic master.
But when the Schumann in question is his wife, Clara, the name should remind us most of the frustrating lack of recognition still accorded female composers.
My latest piece for STRINGS magazine is on the very belated US premiere of an early string trio by George Enescu:
Fellow musicians — especially string players — have resorted to some striking superlatives to characterize George Enescu (1881–1955). Pablo Casals, a frequent chamber partner, once remarked that since Mozart, there had been no greater musical phenomenon, while Enescu’s student Yehudi Menuhin believed the Op. 25 Third Sonata (“dans le caractère populaire roumain”) represented “the greatest achievement of musical notation” he had ever known…
"I've been an artist since I was a child," says James "Yaya" Hough. After serving 27 years in prison, he is now the first-ever artist in residence at the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office.
In The Zealot and the Emancipator, historian H.W. Brands reflects on two 19th century leaders who fought the institution of slavery in different ways: one radical and the other reformist.
An uneducated sailor falls in love and finds fame as a writer — only to become disillusioned by his own success. It's an intensely political work, which London wrote as a rejection of individualism.
Kazim Ali's new poetry collection was inspired by the story of Sheila Chandra, a well-known singer rendered voiceless by an incurable neurological condition.
Lauren Tarshis's I Survived series takes kids through famous historical disasters — and more recent ones like the California wildfires. So they're perfect pandemic books for anxious little readers.
When photographer Jacob Moscovitch's grandmother died in Israel earlier this year, he and his family couldn't travel because of the pandemic. Instead, he photographed his mother's grieving process.
Undertale, the quirky, pixelated adventure game, became a smash hit when it came out because of its unique mechanism: You can talk to its monsters and show them mercy, rather than killing them.
Alix Harrow's new book is set in an alternate 19th-century America where the suffragette movement exists alongside a quest to restore magic and end the banishment of witches and witchcraft.
