July 20, 2015 • 9:42 am Comments Off on An Unusual and Moving Evening at Seattle’s Summer Chamber Music Festival
Nicholas Phan
New Bachtrack review:
The second week of the Seattle Chamber Music Society’s month-long Summer Festival concluded with a programme that – as the two earlier concerts that week had similarly done – expanded perceptions of the notion of chamber music itself by including works that cross over the instrumental divide and call for voice.
Filed under: Britten, chamber music, James Ehnes, review, Seattle Chamber Music Society, Strauss
July 16, 2015 • 11:47 am Comments Off on How Janáček Bucked the Trend
In a Janáček mood after hearing last night’s mesmerizing performance of Zápisník zmizelého (“The Diary of One Who Disappeared”) at the Summer Chamber Festival. This song cycle/minidrama of a hapless farm boy’s seduction by a mysterious Gypsy woman was performed with minimal but haunting staging. Great work by tenor Nicholas Phan, mezzo Sasha Cooke, and pianist Jeremy Denk, along with singers Rena Harms, Nerys Jones, and Rachelle Moss.
(Copy of the score here, with its killer tessitura for the tenor.)
Unfortunately I missed the prelude concert featuring Benjamin Beilman and Denk in Janáček’s Violin Sonata. (Beilman and cellist Efe Baltacıgil gave a marvelous rendition last week, along with pianist Anna Polonsky, of the rarely heard Shostakovich First Piano Trio.)
Here’s Ian Bostridge — who even made a documentary about Diary — on the real significance of Janáček’s legacy:
It’s telling, I think, that the voice came first. Janácek’s musical creativity needed an immersion in humanity, in emotion, in flesh and blood, to sustain it. In that sense, he was a world away from the mainstream of German modernism (Schoenberg, Webern et al) or the success story of international eclecticism, Stravinsky, for whom music was about music, not really an expressive art form at all. Stravinsky wrote few songs, and his one opera, ‘The Rake’s Progress’, brilliant and moving as it is, remains cumulatively cold and detached.
If Janácek’s music lives with an extraordinary power and urgency, it is because he bucked the trend of musical abstraction. He did so because he couldn’t avoid it, because it was in his temperament to confuse the personal and the aesthetic. This is something of an intellectual puzzle – how, after all, do we turn feelings into music? – and, at the same time, an artistic miracle.
Filed under: chamber music, Leoš Janáček
July 14, 2015 • 9:04 am Comments Off on James Ehnes on His “Other” Life as a Chamber Musician
photo © Benjamin Ealovega 2012
Here’s my piece for The Strad about violinist James Ehnes and his string quartet, who recently opened Seattle Chamber Music Society’s 2015 Summer Festival:
James Ehnes has long been a familiar presence on the international circuit, but he remains known to many music lovers primarily as a solo violinist — a virtuoso who, armed with a stunning technique, also has something compelling to say. When he does appear in chamber programmes, it’s often been with a piano partner or in varying chamber formations.
Filed under: Beethoven, chamber music, James Ehnes, Seattle Chamber Music Society
July 10, 2015 • 9:08 am Comments Off on Leon Kirchner at Seattle Summer Chamber Festival
I was happy to hear Leon Kirchner’s (1919-2009) Trio No. 1 from 1954 programmed on the second concert of the ongoing Summer Chamber Festival. Cellist Ronald Thomas, together with violinist Augustin Hadelich and pianist Orion Weiss, gave an involving and committed performance of this complex score.
By way of introduction, Thomas charmingly recounted memories from years ago of the eccentric composer watching over rehearsals and reacting to the sound of his music. He framed the Trio as a work still rooted in the “gestures of Romanticism” beneath its imposing dissonance and rhythmic complexity. “Imagine it’s Richard Strauss, only with the notes not quite right.”
Filed under: American music, chamber music
July 6, 2015 • 8:55 am Comments Off on Chamber Seattle
This evening brings the opening of the month-long Summer Festival presented by the Seattle Chamber Music Society. James Ehnes, director of SCMS, will be here with the Ehnes Quartet to perform a mini-Beethoven festival of three string quartets tonight, Wednesday, and Friday.
The YouTube sample here is of the Ehnes Quartet from their recording of Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8.
Later in the month (20 July) SCMS will present the world premiere of this year’s commissioned work: Cantus by the wonderful Steven Stucky (whose first opera, The Classical Style receives its first-ever full staging later this month at the Aspen Festival.
Filed under: chamber music, James Ehnes, Seattle Chamber Music Society
January 18, 2015 • 8:45 am Comments Off on St. Lawrence String Quartet at 25
Tonight the SLSQ gives the world premiere of John Adams’s Second String Quartet at Stanford.
Here’s a clip of the SLSQ playing the second movement from Adams’s First Quartet:
One of my favorite string quartets is celebrating its 25th anniversary with a typical overdrive of crative activity. Here’s my recent portrait of the St. Lawrence for Stanford Arts:
“It’s a great time both to be playing in a string quartet and to be writing string quartets,” remarks Geoff Nuttall, first violinist and cofounder of the St. Lawrence String Quartet (SLSQ). He’s thrilled about how both pursuits—those of the recreative performing artist and of the composer who creates from scratch—will be fused in three distinctive ways during the course of the SLSQ’s upcoming season at Bing Concert Hall.
Filed under: chamber music, commissions, John Adams, string quartet
October 2, 2014 • 5:18 am Comments Off on St. Lawrence String Quartet at 25
One of my favorite string quartets is celebrating its 25th anniversary with a typical overdrive of crative activity. Here’s my recent portrait of the St. Lawrence for Stanford Arts:
“It’s a great time both to be playing in a string quartet and to be writing string quartets,” remarks Geoff Nuttall, first violinist and cofounder of the St. Lawrence String Quartet (SLSQ). He’s thrilled about how both pursuits—those of the recreative performing artist and of the composer who creates from scratch—will be fused in three distinctive ways during the course of the SLSQ’s upcoming season at Bing Concert Hall.
Filed under: chamber music, commissions, John Adams, string quartet
August 4, 2014 • 8:32 am Comments Off on Seattle Chamber Music Festival Closes on an Elegiac Note
My review of the concluding concert of the 2014 Summer Festival is now on Bachtrack:
The days are starting to grow noticeably shorter in the Pacific Northwest, and the end of the month-long Seattle Chamber Music Society Summer Festival brings yet another wistful reminder that we’re now facing the season’s inexorable downward slope. An immersive atmosphere of four weeks of three concerts each (plus free prelude recitals and additional events) gives the festival much of its flavour, making one all the more reluctant to bid adieu.
It’s been a month especially generous in discoveries, from the world première of an imaginatively crafted single-movement piano trio commissioned from Derek Bermel (with the Saramago-inspired title Death with Interruptions) to a welcome dose of vocal chamber music gems and other rarities mixed in with more standard fare.
On Saturday night the festival drew to a close with a typically diverse roster of musicians (totalling 15 over the course of the concert).
Filed under: Beethoven, chamber music, review
July 14, 2014 • 10:17 am Comments Off on A Derek Bermel Premiere
The composer Derek Bermel gives an introduction to his new Piano Trio, titled Death with Interruptions after José Saramago’s novel. Commissioned by the Seattle Chamber Music Society, it receives its world premiere on tonight’s program, part of the 2014 Summer Festival.
My recent preview of the Summer Festival includes more on Death with Interruptions from my interview with Bermel.
Filed under: chamber music, commissions, new music
July 11, 2014 • 8:45 am Comments Off on Seattle’s Chamber Music Summer Festival: Review
James Ehnes; © Benjamin Ealovega
Tomorrow will mark the first anniversary of Memeteria. I wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t have the archives to the right to prove it — this year has been a whirlwind. A huge thanks to all my readers for taking the time to visit. I hope you will continue to come back and would love to hear from you.
And how’s this for unplanned synchronicity: my very first piece was a report on the opening of the Seattle Chamber Music Society’s Summer Festival. And my latest offering is a review of one of the 2014 Summer Festival’s concerts. To wit:
For 33 summers now, the Seattle Chamber Music Society (SCMS) has been presenting an extensive festival that now ranks as a particularly desired destination for musicians on the summer chamber circuit across North America. This latest edition is off to an especially invigorating start. For their part, the audiences tend to be uniformly enthusiastic and devoted, but last night’s performances met with vociferous approval that reached the extreme end of the applause-meter.
The unusual programme design – juxtaposing Stravinsky’s infrequently heard Octet for Winds with bread-and-butter classics by Mendelssohn and Beethoven – is a signature of James Ehnes, now in his third year as SCMS’s artistic director.
Filed under: chamber music, James Ehnes, review
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MEMETERIA by Thomas May 