“To describe the beauties of this region will, on some future occasion, be a very grateful task to the pen of a skillful panegyrist,” reported Captain George Vancouver in 1792. Vancouver led the first European expedition to chart Puget Sound—as he dubbed what would become the US portion of the larger Salish Sea long inhabited by the Coast Salish indigenous peoples. Many of the British place names conferred by Vancouver have endured, but the area’s best-known city, Seattle, founded by white settlers in 1851, stands apart as being named after an indigenous leader, Chief Seattle (using the Anglicized version of his actual Lushootseed name, Siʔaɬ)…
Two blissful weekends of intimate music-making are about to start as Seattle Chamber Music Society’s 2024 Winter Festival kicks off on Friday, 26 January. Artistic Director James Ehnes will appear in all six programs over the festival’s two weekends. On opening night, he’ll join colleagues Amy Schwartz Moretti, Che-Yen Chen, Cynthia Phelps, Edward Arron, and Efe Baltacıgil for Brahms’s String Sextet No. 1 in B-flat major, Op. 18; the program also includes Ravel’s Violin Sonata No. 2 in G major and British composer Rebecca Clarke’s Piano Trio — part of this winter edition’s focus on 20th-century British composers.
Jan. 26-28 and Feb. 2-4; Benaroya Hall, 200 University St., Seattle; $30-$65; subscriptions and streaming options available; free prelude recital starts an hour before each concert; seattlechambermusic.org
Seattle Chamber Music Society Artistic Director and violinist James Ehnes (left) with colleagues. SCMS’ Summer Festival runs July 3-28. (Jenna Poppe)
I suggested some unmissable programs in this year’s edition off the 2023 Summer Festival, which lasts throughout July:
Changes have been afoot since the Seattle Chamber Music Society returned to a full live season — from a roving concert truck to a new center located downtown — but what remains a constant is the embarrassment of riches that its Summer Festival offers throughout the month of July.
Steven Osborne, James Ehnes and Alisa Weilerstein; (c)Jenna Poppe
Seattle Chamber Music Society’s 2023 Summer Festival is now in full swing. My review of the opening night concert:
Opening night concerts can be an invitation to default to lightweight programming, letting extramusical distractions become the focus. Not so at Seattle Chamber Music Society. The 2023 Summer Festival kicked off with a concert that kept the audience’s attention avidly fixed on the music at hand…
Seattle Chamber Music Society’s 2023 edition of the Winter Festival has started, presenting two weekends of chamber music by Beethoven, Fanny Mendelssohn, Ravel, William Grant Still, Julia Perry, et al. plus a new work by contemporary American composer Jeremy Turner, who is especially known for his TV and stage scores.
The second weekend of concerts includes the local premiere (Feb. 3) of Turner’s Six Mile House for clarinet, violin, piano, and cello. which was inspired by the Charleston, SC-based urban legend about Sweeney Todd-ish murders said to have been committed by an evil innkeeper couple.
SCMS Artistic Director James Ehnes will be onstage for the three concerts of the second weekend, playing works by Brahms, Shostakovich, and César Franck. And a free prelude recital is open to the public before each concert — no ticket required. Here’s the free prelude lineup:
January 27 – 6:30PM Richard Strauss: Violin Sonata, Op.18 Arnaud Sussmann, violin Jeewon Park, piano
January 28 – 6:30PM Franz Schubert: Fantasie in F minor, D. 940 Dmitri Shostakovich: Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, Op. 67 SCMS Academy Musicians
January 29 – 2:00PM Sergei Prokofiev: Piano Sonata No. 6, Op. 82 Adam Neiman, piano
February 3 – 6:30PM Julia Perry: Prelude William Grant Still: Three Visions George Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue, solo version 1924 Andrew Armstrong, piano
February 4 – 6:30PM Ludwig van Beethoven: Piano Trio in C minor, Op. 1 No. 3 SCMS Academy Musicians
February 5 – 2:00PM Franz Joseph Haydn: String Quartet in F minor, Op. 20, No. 5 James Ehnes and Amy Schwartz Moretti, violins; Che-Yen Chen, viola; Edward Arron, cello
And they’re off to an auspicious start… Here’s my review of opening night for Bachtrack:
Nothing could stop this show from going on — not even a popped viola string nearly midway through Béla Bartók’s grueling String Quartet no. 6 at the center of the program that opened the Seattle Chamber Music Society’s 2022 Summer Festival…
To tee off the 2022 Summer Festival, which starts on 5 July, Seattle Chamber Music Society is introducing the Concert Truck: a mobile concert hall equipped with piano and professional lighting and sound. The Concert Truck will be giving free chamber concerts at stops around the Seattle region in the days leading up to the opening of the Festival.
This weekend marks the start of Seattle Chamber Music Society’s two-weekendWinter Festival.
And see the video above for a lecture by Michael Kannen, cellist, founding member of the Brentano String Quartet, and Professor of Chamber Music at the Peabody Institute, about the piano quintets of Antonin Dvořák, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Cesar Franck — all featured this winter.
Week 2 of Seattle Chamber Music Society’s 2021 Winter Festival continues on Saturday with a program of Schumann, Sibelius, Massenet, and Prokofiev. And since the performance is streamed online, no worries about how the coming winter storm will shape up.
Every concert is available to stream on demand from its release through March 15. Subscriptions for all 6 concerts are $100.
[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.
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 