Looking for a concert to enjoy with your Valentine? An evening of live classical music makes for a classy date night. Sick of the cold and rainy nights? Stellar live music is a fantastic cure for the winter blues. Here’s what we’ve got on the calendar this month.
Feb. 2 – 5 — Experience some of the best chamber music concerts you’ll ever hear at Seattle Chamber Music Society’s Winter Festival, held this year at Benaroya Hall’s Nordstrom Recital Hall.
Feb. 6 — Classical Revolution is a global network of musicians dedicated to playing chamber music in casual, non-traditional settings. The Seattle Chapter will be performing and reading through works by Mendelssohn at Faire Gallery & Café on Capitol Hill.
The Ritz Chamber Players will perform at UW's Meany Hall on February 15.
Feb. 8 — Extraordinary 16-year-old pianist Jan Lisiecki makes his Seattle debut at the UW President’s Piano Series. It’s always exciting to hear an emerging talent.
Feb. 8 – 11 — Musicians from around the world will gather in Wallingford for the Seattle Improvised Music Festival, held in the Chapel Performance Space at the Good Shepherd Center.
Feb. 9 – 12 — Seattle Symphony plays Mussorgsky’s beloved Pictures at an Exhibition, along with works by Stravinsky, Jolivet, and Haydn.
Feb. 11 — Early Music Guild presents a semi-staged performance of Dido and Aeneas, Purcell’s delightful opera.
Feb. 15 — The remarkable Ritz Chamber Players return to the UW Chamber Music Series with a world premiere and works by Crusell, Dvorak, and Beethoven.
Feb. 18 – 19 — It’s always worth making the trip to catch a concert by the Auburn Symphony. This time it’s all about romance. Catch pieces by Berlioz and Chausson, as well as a performance of Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 2 by local favorite Craig Sheppard.
Feb. 23 – 24 — Legendary violinist Itzhak Perlman joins the Seattle Symphony for works by Vivaldi, Mozart, and Beethoven.
Feb. 24 — Experience music from the other side of the Pacific with “Celebrate Asia” at Benaroya Hall. Jie Ma is a featured soloist on the pipa, and exquisite instrument from China.
Feb. 25 – Mar. 10 — Don’t miss Seattle Opera’s production of Orphée et Eurydice, a Gluck masterpiece not seen here in Seattle for 24 years.
Feb. 26 — Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestra performs at Benaroya Hall. This talented group of young musicians is as good as many a professional orchestra…and a lot less expensive to catch in action.
The stellar quality of this year’s Seattle Chamber Music Society Summer Festival (tickets here) continues at The Overlake School in Redmond for another week. For the last time.
Seattle Chamber Music Society put out a press release a few days ago to say that these five concerts at Overlake are the last to be held there, citing financial loss for the Redmond project in each of the seven years since the Festival’s eastside expansion began. “It was a long time in coming, not an easy decision,” says Connie Cooper, executive director.
This means the loss of all the outdoor ambience which was the hallmark of the Festival at Lakeside School and continued at Overlake, even more appreciated after the loss of Lakeside and the move indoors to Seattle’s Nordstrom Recital Hall at Benaroya Hall. This is also the second musical loss to the Eastside this year, after the lamented demise of the Bellevue Philharmonic Orchestra.
Nordstrom holds more people while still being an intimate space for chamber music, and the musicians love it. It has turned out that rather than losing Festival patrons who loved Lakeside, Nordstrom has increased audience, including out-of-town visitors passing through. The lobby outside, however is both noisy and crowded, and of ambience there is none.
Anton Nel
Wednesday night’s concert opened the Overlake five with a capacity audience and fine performances, beginning with an insightful, expressive performance by pianist Anton Nel of Beethoven’s “Waldstein” Sonata. Nel touches the piano so lightly that his fingers almost bounce back off, giving great clarity and evenness to all the fast notes. It the slower sections his hands seem floating on the keys, giving the music a gentle quietness, but there’s plenty of power when needed.
The program of the concert proper comprised favorite composers and no surprises, except that the Stuecke im Volkston (“Pieces in Folksong style”) of Robert Schumann is rarely heard in concert halls, according to cellist Amit Peled, because it is usually regarded as a student piece. We non-cellists don’t get to hear it. I’m glad we did here. Peled with pianist William Wolfram gave it a performance of a caliber rare in students. Peled’s playing of the double stopping (playing on two strings at once) in the third piece, high on the strings, created a remarkable, almost otherwordly feel.
The Schumann was bracketed by Mozart’s Quartet No. 2 for piano and strings at the start, and Brahms’ great Quintet for piano and strings in F Minor at the end. Pianist Adam Neiman’s sensitivity and delicacy of playing gave the Mozart elegance along with his colleagues Ida Levin violin, Che-Yen Chen, viola, and Peled.
Adam Neiman
Many in the audience were fascinated to see that Neiman used, not a regular score (the pianist always has the entire score in chamber music, not only his own but a stave for each instrumental part with it), but an iPad. Watching to see if he turned pages with a finger touch (he didn’t) it became clear later he had a foot pedal where he could turn a page back or a page forward.
One lovely melody after another was brought out in the familiar Brahms work by violinists Scott Yoo and Emily Daggett Smith, violist Marcus Thompson (an oldtime Festival player who has not been here for some years), cellist Robert deMaine and pianist Nel. The eminently satisfactory performance brought the audience to its feet in applause.
The remaining four concerts–Friday this week, then Monday, Wednesday, Friday next week–include many favorites: Elgar, Schubert and more Brahms, Mendelssohn and Dvorak, Prokofiev and more Beethoven.
If you have loved the outdoor feel of the festival, the tall trees and soft breezes, sitting on the grass while watching the stars come out and listening to the music, then go and enjoy them for the last time.
On Friday July 29th, Toby Saks’ reign at Seattle Chamber Music Society comes to an end with a performance celebrating the organization’s 30th birthday and Saks’ 30-year tenure.
This summer’s festival does continue for another couple of weeks, at The Overlake School in Redmond, but the Overlake expansion is a relative newcomer, only seven years old, so the toasts to Saks will be this week.
The concert at Nordstrom Recital Hall will go on as usual though without the usual preceding recital, and it concludes with a special performance of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No.3 with ten musicians, including some luminaries from festivals years past, among them violinist Paul Rosenthal, violist Marcus Thompson, and Jon Kimura Parker playing harpsichord. A few tickets remain if you want to go. A gala dinner in Saks’ honor follows at the Four Seasons.
Meanwhile before that, several highlights beckon at Monday’s and Wednesday’s recitals and concerts; Prokofiev and Shostakovich Monday, preceded by cellist Johannes Moser in the recital playing Bach and Lutoslawski.
Moser is a cellist it is hard to take your eyes off. Dramatic and passionate, the festival newcomer performs with his whole body with a vast range of musical subtleties at his command. You like it or hate it.
Pianist Parker and his wife violinist Aloysia Friedmann will be members of a quintet playing Schumann on Wednesday, their first appearances here this summer.
However, for those who can’t bear to see this summer’s festival ended and those optimists who plan on a picnic on the lawn and listening to the music that way, the five concerts (August 3-12) at Overlake have the same format and the same fine musicmaking, plus some of the festival’s familiar musicians who have only just arrived: pianists Anton Nel and Adam Neiman, violinists Scott Yoo and Ida Levin, cellists Amit Peled and Ronald Thomas. And, there’s no toll on 520 yet. Make the most of it while you can.
Every concert, someone turns to a neighbor and says: “It can’t get any better than this.” Both Friday and Saturday’s performances last week are examples of this. The laurels go to flutist Lorna McGhee, who stole the show in both concerts.
Friday, she and pianist Jeewon Park played Schubert’s Introduction and Variations on “Trockne Blume,” in a performance so closely interwoven together that every shaped note or phrase had just the same emotion, so musically beguiling that this listener sat entranced. McGhee performed Villa-Lobos’ The Jet Whistle here some years ago, and brought it back, this time with cellist Moser. A fun piece to hear, it requires spectacular technique from the flute and McGhee triumphed.
Saturday’s concert saw her in a Trio for flute, viola and harp by Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer, commissioned for the three players who premiered it in Canada earlier this year and again here: McGhee, violist David Harding and harpist Heidi Krutzen. This accessible work bows to the French idiom of a century ago to start with, and ends up with hints of wild central European dances, syncopated, jazzy, fast. Schafer makes good use of the three very different instrument timbres and the result is a work of charm and substance, a fine addition to the literature.
Mozart’s Quintet for two violins (Erin Keefe and James Ehnes), two violas (Harding and Richard O’Neill), and cello (Robert deMaine), in G Minor received to my mind one of the best performances of the festival so far. The musicians all eschewed the hacking which so many string players today seem to feel essential in any loud passages, no matter if the work was composed in a musically gentler time when stringed instruments had gut strings and loud still had to be elegant. Even playing 19th century music, the style today too often can be a double or triple fortissimo and heavy bowing instead of forte, which does not fit well for Brahms, Schumann, or Beethoven, while it may be just right for Bartok or Shostakovich.
Keefe as first violin set the tone and the performance had some wonderful soft moments which sang, while creating plenty of verve where it was needed. The lack of bombast made it memorable.
Laura Kaminsky, composer, and Rebecca Allan, painter
To honor retiring artistic director Toby Saks, Seattle Chamber Music Society’s Commissioning Club asked composer Laura Kaminsky to create a work to be premiered during this year’s Summer Festival. Friday was the night.
Kaminsky spoke in the pre-concert recital time about the genesis of her work, Horizon Lines, with illustrations. She explained that the trio of piano, oboe, and bassoon came about after consultation with Saks, who wanted an unusual combination of instruments to contribute to the literature for those instruments, rather than yet another string quartet.
Further, Kaminsky’s partner, painter Rebecca Allan, was working on an exhibition for the SAM Art Gallery which was going to run at the same time. With Saks’ okay, they decided to merge the two projects, and the final result is a trio with a fourth aspect, a film of Allan’s sketches and photos of the natural world of water which became the theme for both of them and which was produced by John Feldman. Allan’s completed paintings are on display at the SAM Art Gallery now until August 5, also titled “Horizon Lines.”
Kaminsky’s work is divided into six parts, musical and pictorial evocations of water at places important to them: Manasota Key; Spuyten Duyvil, Ice Floes; Wappinger’s Creek, Hudson River Valley; The Fells, River Caldew, Approaching Storm; Ebey’s Landing, Swallows; and Amagansett, Twilight.
"Wappinger Creek/Tipped Horizon" by Rebecca Allan (Image: Rebecca Allan)
Not that you could recognise more than glimpses of these places from the film. While there are a few photos which merge into and out of painted sketches, greenery, water, trees, sand, rocks, and floes are mostly abstract impressions. I grew up in the fells of England’s Cumbria, and one moment of instant recognition was a photo of a rocky stream which could have been one of a thousand similar ones in that area.
Recognition was not the point. It was the overall impression of moving water in all its guises that came through clearly in the film, perhaps less so in the music.
Kaminsky’s music is spare and clear, with the three instruments each going its own way in easy juxtaposition yet largely separate, more impressionistic than melodic, often dissonant. The first movement is for the winds only, the second for piano only. Here, with strong chords and flittery-skittery moments, one could hear and see in the mind’s eye the ice floes heading down river, crashing into each other and shedding sparkling splinters at the junction of the Harlem and Hudson Rivers, as Kaminsky and Allan described them earlier, but one had to have had the word description first.
In the third, the creek movement, the typical constant sound of rippling, rushing water pervaded all the instruments, highly articulated, cheerful, never stopping, getting more violent as presumably the stream reached a rapid.
In the fourth, where the bright colors of Allen’s sketches surprised me but the rocks did not, I thought I heard from the oboe, maybe, a curlew, a bird whose plaintive call can be heard all summer long in the fells.
I’d need to, I’d like to, hear this again, perhaps with my eyes shut, to pick up more. Suffice it to say that while the whole work is maybe 30 minutes long, the interest never flagged. Pianist Craig Sheppard, bassoonist Seth Krimsky, and oboist Ben Hausmann gave it a fine performance.
The rest of the virtually sold out concert at Nordstrom Recital Hall included two wonderful performances, one of Boccherini’s bright and lively Quintet in C Major with violinists Nurit Bar-Josef and Amy Schwartz-Moretti, violist Richard O’Neill, and cellists Bion Tsang and Godfried Hoogeveen. Boccherini was a cellist and always gave himself a starring part, so this could have been described as a work for cello and string quartet with Tsang having Boccherini’s prominent part.
The performance of Brahms’ Quartet for Piano and Strings in A Major, the one that was Clara Schumann’s favorite, left one thinking the players, violinist Joseph Lin, violist Cynthia Phelps, cellist Edward Arron and pianist Jeremy Denk, had been working together for months if not years, so intuitive and close was their ensemble, so expressive and thoughtful their interpretation.
There’s a concert tomorrow, Sunday and then performances Friday and Saturday next week ( tickets: 206-283-8808 or online), a change from the regular schedule which returns the following week.
Toby Saks won’t be running it any more, but she isn’t going away. While she is handing over the artistic director reins of Seattle Chamber Music Society and its summer and winter festivals to violinist James Ehnes, she will still be a presence there, with advice as asked for, with her in-depth knowledge of the chamber music scene, and not least, with her house open to all the visiting musicians for rehearsing, eating and just hanging out.
Monday saw the opening performance of the 30th Summer Festival, in its second year at Nordstrom Recital Hall. There will be 17 series and two family concerts, four weeks in July at Nordstrom, and two weeks in August at The Overlake School in Redmond. For those who want to listen in a more casual atmosphere, the music will be piped free to the Garden of Remembrance outside Benaroya Hall and, on Friday July 8, 15, and 22, to Westlake Park as well, while at Overlake there is a lawn to picnic on while listening.
As well, the Society has always presented a free half-hour recital one hour before each concert.
Saks’ has chosen many of her favorite works for her final season, not all of them, she says, because there are far too many, but we can look forward to an eclectic variety of composers, mostly from the great heyday of chamber music, the classical and romantic eras.
Photo: Seattle Chamber Music Society
Monday’s performances opened the festival on a high note. The recitalists choose their own programs, and pianist Orion Weiss performed three toccatas and an unexpected fourth, beginning with Bach’s Toccata in C Minor. From the first notes, one could sit back and bask in the sound, because it was clear that this was a consummate musician who could elucidate Bach’s mysteries. He brought each line of music as its musical prominence indicated, yet the whole had a coherent completeness and transparency.
Weiss described a toccata as being a work of fantasy, often seemingly improvisatory, often leading into a fugue, a description which fitted the Bach. He neglected to mention that a toccata is usually a virtuoso piece. The Bach certainly is, and even more so the works which followed: a minute-long Toccata by Liszt which had enough notes for a symphony, and the more substantial Toccata in C Major by Schumann. Each of these requires a superb technique to encompass the notes yet make that all in service to the music itself. Weiss achieved it with ease and insight, though I felt the Schumann could have been played a tad slower with a little more room to breathe.
He finished up with an impromptu encore, a Toccata by Keith Jarrett. One might think that Jarrett, 150 years or so younger than Liszt, and from a different musical stream, might not fit here, but this was an equally brilliant performance which followed seamlessly in the genre.
If this recital hadn’t been enough work for him for one night, with festival newcomer pianist Inon Barnatan, Weiss also played the closing work of the concert proper, Rachmaninoff’s Suite No. 2 in C Major for two pianos. Barnatan fits the mold of artists new to the festival. He’s young, 32 this year, received an Avery Fisher grant in 2009 and has been building an impressive name for himself as an artist.
Barnatan is a welcome addition. His and Weiss’s performance of the Rachmaninoff demanded attention. Exciting from the start, thunderous at times—imagine four hands using what sounded like all the fingers playing together and clamoring to be heard—as well as exquisite softness, lively and light with the two players apparently having a great time. More important, they played as though one. Two piano works can often sound clunky, but apart from one chord at the end of the first movement where they weren’t quite together, the two men were in the same intuitive groove which became tighter and tighter as the work progressed. Often two piano works are performed by siblings, or people who have known each other for decades. Barnatan and Weiss have only know each other for a few years, and played together sometimes, but one would never know it.
In between these bookends of Monday’s performances came Glazounov’s Quintet for Strings in A Major, with two cellos, and two trios for violin, cello and piano, one by Brahms in C Minor, and the other Three Nocturnes by Ernst Bloch. All were worth hearing, but the standout was the less familiar Bloch.
Written between the two world wars, Saks’ husband Martin Greene observed that it was composed by a Swiss Jew, and played here by a Russian Jew, pianist Anna Polonsky; a Dutchman, cellist Godfried Hoogeveen; and a German, violinist Augustin Hadelich.
The Nocturnes are gorgeous. Not flashy, but quiet, enigmatic; muted at first, expansive and joyful in the second one and with a hint of Ravel’s “Chansons Madecasses” in their mood, while the last sounded more like a fairly riotous nighttime party. The musicians balanced their performance so that the qualities of each instrument came through and the music sang.
Friday’s recital has Andres Diaz playing his 1698 Goffriller cello in Bach and composer Xi Wang, and concertgoers will hear Beethoven’s Piano Trio in E-Flat Major, and two piano quartets, by Suk and Dvorak.
Monday July 11 has Schumann, Mozart, Schubert, Debussy and a blockbuster quartet by Richard Strauss. All well worth hearing. For tickets: call 206-283-8808 or purchase online. For information email info@seattlechambermusic.org.
