Mixed Media

Cooperstown Chamber Music Festival kicks off 10th anniversary season

The Cooperstown Chamber Music Festival will kick-off its tenth anniversary season with two evening concerts, a Family Music Fest concert, and the Festival’s first-ever Pro-Am Seminar. The Festival continues through August 19 with a mix of classical and jazz offerings performed by an engaging roster of artists.

On July 11, the concert Nature Calls, features Schubert’s popular Trout Quintet, a new arrangement of Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals and Heinrich von Biber’s Sonata Representiva, and George Crumb’s Voice of the Whale for three masked players.

“The program shows how composers from three different centuries portrayed animals in music,” says    Festival artistic director Linda Chesis, who will be performing in the concert. “The Farmers’ Museum is the ideal venue for this thematic concert. You’ll hear all sorts of animals, from cats, cuckoos, and swans to frogs, elephants and beluga whales,” says Ms. Chesis.

This concert, which will be held at The Farmers’ Museum Louis C. Jones Center at 7:30 pm, includes a pre-concert chat with the artists at 7 pm, and a post-concert reception with the artists, hosted by Brewery Ommegang. Artists include: Linda Chesis, flute; Gil Morgenstern, violin; Kathryn Lockwood, viola; Wilhelmina Smith, cello; Shirley Irek, piano; and Jeremy McCoy, double bass.

On Saturday, July 12 at 11 am, the Festival offers a kid-friendly introduction to the string quartet. Family Music Fest: What’s That Four? features the highly acclaimed Parker String Quartet. This event, which includes a post-concert instrument petting zoo, where kids can try out musical instruments, costs $15 per family.

The Parkers perform works by Haydn, Janáček, and Beethoven on Sunday, July 13 at 7:30 pm at The Farmers’ Museum. The Boston-based string quartet won both the Concert Artists Guild International Competition and the Bordeaux International String Quartet Competition in 2005.

“The Parker String Quartet is one of the very best young quartets performing today,” says Ms. Chesis. “The concert features a great Haydn quartet, one of Beethoven’s blockbuster quartets that marked the arrival of his heroic period, and the dramatic Janáček quartet inspired by Tolstoy’s novel, The Kreutzer Sonata.

Continuing its tradition of offering free community concerts, the Festival’s first-ever Pro-Am Seminar pairs accomplished amateurs with three professional musicians. “We see this as an opportunity to celebrate chamber music as a lifelong pursuit that can be enjoyed and shared,” says Ms. Chesis, who will be leading the Pro-Am Seminar with David Geber, cello, and Shirley Irek, piano. These concerts will be held in venues throughout the Cooperstown area, July 14-16.

“The individuals joining us for the seminar are truly amazing people, who have excelled in their professional life while dedicating time and talent to their love of music,” explains Ms. Chesis. Mark Ptashne, who holds the Ludwig Chair of Molecular Biology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, is a violinist who has performed at many festivals. Bruce Harris is an attending neurosurgeon at Cooperstown’s Bassett Healthcare who is an accomplished pianist. Matt Rosen, a managed healthcare consultant with a Ph.D. in sociology, plays cello and has participated in chamber music workshops in the US and abroad along with his wife, Geraldine Van Dusen. Ms. Van Dusen, a violinist, is a managing editor at St. Martin’s Press in New York City.

Also participating in the Pro-Am Seminar are three students from the Manhattan School of Music, where Mr. Geber is Dean of the Faculty for Instrumental Performance and Ms. Chesis is a member of the flute faculty and chair of the Woodwind Department. The students are Monica Davis, violin/viola; Leat Sabbah, cello; and Emily DiAngelo, oboe, who is also serving as the Festival’s intern and production manager.

After coaching sessions and rehearsals, the artists will perform at Pathfinder Village on July 14 at 7 pm, the Fenimore Art Museum auditorium on July 15 at 12 noon and July 16 at 12 noon. These concerts are free and open to all. The group also will perform for the residents of the Thanksgiving Home in Cooperstown.

Season continues through August 19

The Cooperstown Chamber Music Festival tenth anniversary season also features a Baroque concert on July 23, the Daedalus Quartet and clarinetist David Shifrin on August 3, Flute Fest at the Otesaga (another free community concert) on August 7, Chords and Strings with The Brasil Guitar Duo on August 9, Trio Solisti and Linda Chesis on August 13, Family Music Fest: Go for Baroque on August 16, Gala 10th Anniversary Concert: The Brandenburg Concertos on August 17, and jazz with the Brubeck Brothers Quartet on August 19. Evening concerts begin at 7:30 pm. Audiences are invited to attend 7 pm pre-concert chats with the artists on the following dates: July 11, 13, 23, and August 3, 9, 13.

Tickets and Information
Evening concerts are $30 for adults. Students (6-18) tickets for evening concerts are $15. Daytime Family Music Fest events are $15 per family. Pro-Am Seminar concerts and the Flute Fest at the Otesaga concert are free and do not require a ticket or reservation. Program subject to change.

For more information, call toll-free 877- MOOSIC1 (877-666-7421), or visit the Festival’s web site.

Listen Again: YouTube Monks Storm European Pop Charts

The monks of Heiligenkreuz Abbey in Austria sing ancient Gregorian chants in their 12th-century church — and then post them to YouTube. Their technological savvy landed them a record deal, and now their album is storming the European charts and arriving in America. Father Karl Wallner talks to host Andrea Seabrook about balancing pop stardom with the religious life.

Listen to the piece.

And here's one of the many YouTube videos of the monks performing.

Cooperstown Chamber Music Festival performance featured on Performance Today

Performance Today will broadcast Hopkinson Smith's performance of "The Right Honourable Robert, Earle of Essex, his Galliard" and "Fantasie" by Dowland. The concert was recorded on August 1, 2007 at the Cooperstown Chamber Music Festival.

This performance will air on Thursday's edition of Performance Today, which broadcasts from 2 to 4 p.m. on WSKG Public Radio.

Behind the Art: Violinist Baiba Skride's star is on the rise

Critics, too, have fallen for her charms. Reviewing her performance of Lalo's Symphonie Espagnole with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the Washington Post wrote, "Skride was completely unfazed by the work's myriad technical challenges, playing not only proficiently but with flair and a nearly improvisatory freedom."

Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times praised her recording of Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto as "the most sophisticated performance of the concerto I know." When I meet with Baiba Skride, the day before her October debut at London's Wigmore Hall, she looks very pretty, very relaxed-and very pregnant, with the birth of her first child a scant two months away. Her advanced stage of pregnancy had required her to cancel an autumn US tour, about which she is quite apologetic: "It would be four weeks before the due date. I never cancel anything, but this time I had to cancel!"

With the birth of her son, Emilien, in December, she already has made amends: at press time, she was scheduled to perform the Mendelssohn Concerto with the Minnesota Orchestra in April, the Tchaikovsky with the Oregon Symphony in October, and two Mozart concertos in Detroit in November.

Born in 1981 in Riga, in the small Baltic republic of Latvia, Skride comes from a musical family. She's the second of three girls, all of whom are professional musicians: younger sister Lauma is a pianist and frequent duo partner, while older sister Linda is a professional violist. Their father is a choir conductor and their mother a pianist.

"We got our first introduction to music from my grandmother, who used to teach singing to little kids," Skride says. "She taught us our first song together, we three sisters."

The love of music, especially vocal music, is a vital part of Latvian society, Skride says. She tells me about the 1991 Singing Revolution, during which the Russians were trying to regain control of the Baltic republics. "People were standing in front of [the main buildings in Riga] and singing, not with any weapons or any anger, just using the force of music," she says. "Now, every five years, we have this huge singing festival, where 30,000 people sing together.

Read the full article by Inje Kjemtrup here.

Listen Again: William Kapell reDiscovered

In the 1940s, William Kapell was classical music's next great pianist.

He won his first competition at age 10. By the time Kapell was in his early 20s, he was famous.

In 1953, he spent 14 weeks touring Australia, playing 37 concerts. But on the return home, he was killed when his plane crashed outside of San Francisco. He was only 31.

By the 1960s, Kapell's recordings were out of print. Only the most dedicated of collectors hunted them down in secondhand stores, and William Kapell was largely forgotten.

But long before TiVo, MP3s or even cassette tapes, there was an Australian music fan named Roy Preston. He avidly recorded concerts broadcast on Australian radio, including several from Kapell's last tour more than half a century ago.

Those recordings have just been issued commercially in a two-CD set called Kapell reDiscovered: The Australian Broadcasts. Washington Post music critic Tim Page has written extensively about Kapell — he wrote the liner notes for the new album — and spoke with Andrea Seabrook about the collection.

Click here to listen to the piece that aired on All Things Considered, and to listen to recordings of William Kapell's final tour in Australia.

Copland in Hollywood

Not so long ago, a classical composer who dared to try his hand at film music was treated by his colleagues like a nice girl who'd gone to work in a whorehouse. So it came as something of a shock with Aaron Copland, who had just made a name for himself with his music for "Billy the Kid," Eugene Loring's cowboy ballet, flew to Hollywood in 1939 to score a commercial feature film, returning home six weeks later with $5,000 in his pocket -- the equivalent of $73,000 today -- and his artistic honor intact. "Several people were surprised to see me back in New York," Copland later wrote in his memoirs. "There seemed to be an idea that once one went to Hollywood, he was lost forever to the rest of the music world!"

Copland's part-time career as a film composer is one of the most fascinating chapters in the story of his professional life. Yet few know much about it. Nowadays, of course, it's perfectly respectable for a serious musician to moonlight in Hollywood, and scholars pore over the scores of Bernard Herrmann and Erich Wolfgang Korngold the same way they once sifted through Beethoven's sketchbooks. But none of Copland's half-dozen Hollywood film scores, not even the Oscar-winning one he wrote for "The Heiress," has been recorded in its entirety.

Why has so important a part of Copland's output been so completely ignored? I haven't a clue. Fortunately, four of the feature films for which he wrote music are readily available on DVD, and all of them bear close watching -- and listening.

Click here to read the full article.

Great Composers & a World Premiere with the Binghamton Philharmonic tomorrow (4/5/08)

Binghamton Philharmonic Composer-in-Residence Carlos Sánchez-Gutiérrez (pictured, right) and Music Director José-Luis Novo stopped by for a live radio interview today. I hadn't had the opportunity to interview either gentleman before, so it was a treat for me. I could have kept them for an hour, especially on the subject of new music and its place in the concert hall and on our airwaves.

The new music in question today is ...Ex Machina for for Piano, Marimba and Orchestra by Carlos Sánchez-Gutiérrez , which was commissioned by the Binghamton Philharmonic. Guest performers for the work are marimbist Makoto Nakura and pianist Cristina Valdés.

Sánchez-Gutiérrez also appeared on WSKG TV's Expressions program last night, holding forth on the same subject. You can see that program online.

The concert tomorrow night in Binghamton University's Anderson Center also features Brahms Symphony No. 2 and Beethoven's Egmont Overture (which we inadvertently played twice on WSKG Radio today within the same hour--I played it with the interview then our network classical service coincidentally played it right after the 10am news. I hate it when that happens.)

Interestingly, Sánchez-Gutiérrez work is inspired by the kinetic sculptures of Arthur Ganson, who joins the composer for a pre-concert talk in the Anderson Center Chamber Hall an hour before the concert. The lecture is free for ticket holders.

--Gregory Keeler

www.binghamtonphilharmonic.org

composer Carlos Sánchez-Gutiérrez' website

sculptor Arthur Ganson's website

Listen Again: Pianist Kariné Poghosyan recital

Classical Pianists of the Future presents
Kariné Poghosyan in recital

Sunday, March 2, 3pm
Tri-Cities Opera Center
315 Clinton Street
Binghamton, NY  1390

Armenian born pianist Kariné Poghosyan will give a recital as part of the Classical Pianists of the Future series at the Tri-Cities Opera Center, 315 Clinton St., Binghamton.

Some of Ms. Poghosyan's performances include recitals at the Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall, the Trinity's Concerts at One series at the St. Paul's Chapel, the Beverly Hills Sundays at Two series,  a recital for the Valley Committee for the LA Philharmonic, the Bach's Lunch Recital Series in Manhattan Beach in California, the Los Angeles Liszt Competition Winners' Concert at the Nixon Library, the Young Artists International Peninsula Festival in California, and the International Keyboard Institute and Festival in New York. She has appeared with numerous orchestras including the New West Symphony, Musica Bella Symphony Orchestra, CSUN Symphony Orchestra, and Armenian Youth Symphony.

'Classical Pianists of the Future' is a collaboration between Alvin H. Williams III and Lance G. Hill, both of Vestal. Williams has participated for several years as co-director of the Thousand Islands International Piano Competition for Young People; Hill is a well-known piano tuner-technician, musicologist and classical music radio program host. Their intent is to provide emerging top-flight young classical pianists ongoing performance opportunities in the Greater Binghamton area and beyond.

The Tri-Cities Opera Center is home to a magnificent, fully restored 1913 Bechstein concert grand piano, which will showcase the talents of pianists such as Kariné Poghosyan.

Tickets at the door: $10. Details: Call 748-2231.

Listen to Bill Snyder's interview with Lance Hill and Alvin Williams, curators of the series.

Concert Spotlight: Ithaca College Wind Ensemble performs 'Circus Maximus'

In a performance called “monumental” by its conductor, the Ithaca College Wind Ensemble will feature John Corigliano’s “Circus Maximus,” a piece of music which literally surrounds the audience with sound. The free concert will take place in Bailey Hall on the Cornell University campus on Sunday, Feb. 24, at 3 p.m.

“The music involves huge forces, including 11 surround trumpets, surround flutes, clarinets, percussionists, and a saxophone quartet,” said conductor Stephen Peterson, a professor of music performance at Ithaca College. “There will also be a small marching band, which will make its way through the hall during the climax of the 37-minute work.”

The percussion section includes two sirens and a shotgun, Peterson added.

“The only venue in the area that could accommodate this piece is Bailey Hall, and the Cornell Department of Music graciously offered the use of Bailey for this event. We’re grateful to so many people at Cornell, as well as 30 additional Ithaca College musicians, to make this program possible.”

The piece has been performed by college wind ensembles and the U.S. Marine Band, always to rave reviews that have noted the overwhelming reaction of audiences to the huge work. The “Austin Chronicle” wrote that, “What was most powerful and extraordinary about ‘Circus Maximus’ was the way it reflected those pressures and the character of our culture—the violence, the pride, the impatience, the disconnectedness, the sense of menace and of mourning—to a degree that was unnerving.”

Also on the program of music by American visionaries are works of Copland and Ives, and “Lollapalooza” by John Adams. The guest conductor for these works will be Cynthia Johnson-Turner, Cornell’s director of wind ensembles.

For more information, call (607) 274-3717.

Concert Spotlight: The Tallis Scholars perform at Ithaca College

On Thursday, Feb. 28, the Tallis Scholars — an ensemble of vocalists specializing music of the Renaissance — will perform the second of three performances in the Ithaca College Concerts year-long season “Legends.” The concert will begin at 8:15 p.m. in Ford Hall in the James J. Whalen Center for Music.

The 2007–2008 season has been named “Legends” because it offers concerts by world renowned performers who have established themselves as popular and enduring figures. The season will conclude in April with the 30-year reunion tour of Tashi, the renowned chamber music ensemble.

Entitled “Music of Spain and Portugal,” the Tallis Scholars performance features the “Requiem” for six voices by Tomás Luis de Victoria. Music in Latin by several other Spanish and Portuguese composers rounds out the program.

The Tallis Scholars were founded in 1973 by Peter Phillips, their tireless and inspirational Oxford-educated director. Phillips has worked with the ensemble to create, through good tuning and blend, the purity and clarity of sound that he feels best serves the Renaissance repertoire, thus allowing every detail of the musical lines to be heard.

The ensemble has established itself as a leading exponent of Renaissance sacred music through its approximately 70 concerts a year and over 50 award-winning recordings on the Gimmel label. They are among the busiest ensembles in the world, with regular tours throughout Europe, North and South America, and the Far East.

Individual tickets are on sale at the Clinton House Ticket Center and at Ithacaevents.com.
For more information on Ithaca College Concerts, call (607) 274-3717.