Month: July 2009

Wednesday’s concert of the Seattle Chamber Music Festival at Lakeside School sold out more than a month ago, with a line of people waiting at the box office hoping for a returned ticket or two. A number of concerts this season, as in previous summers, have sold-out, but four weeks ahead is unusual.

One has to believe the reason is in the repertory. In this case that means Mendelssohn’s First Piano Quartet, Beethoven’s Violin Sonata in G and Shostakovich’s Piano Trio in E Minor. The Mendelssohn has only been played twice in previous seasons, once at Lakeside and once at the winter festival, and the Beethoven, four times at Lakeside and once at Overlake. It is the Shostakovich that has had so many performances: six at Lakeside and one at the winter festival.

Continue reading Mendelssohn and Shostakovich are the bookends for a superb concert at the Seattle Chamber Music Festival

At the beginning of each Seattle Chamber Music Concert a disembodied voice instructs audience members to not record or photograph the performance and asks people to turn down their hearing aids. For a variety of reasons it’s a request I find humorous. On the one hand I remember bearing witness to plenty of embarrassing episodes where grandparents cranked up the sensitivity of their hearing aid to hear something on the television only to have the hearing aid’s high-pitched buzz agitate every dog in the neighborhood. What harm could a hearing aid do? Is it really necessary to ask people to turn down their hearing aid?  Turns out, it is.

Wednesday’s Seattle Chamber Music Society concert was marked by steady playing from the musicians, average repertory, and a hearing aid run amok during Beethoven’s Ghost Trio.

Continue reading Not even a malfunctioning hearing aid can throw off Beethoven’s “Ghost”

Jeremy Denk gave the concert of a lifetime on Saturday evening (July 18) as part of the recital series offered at the World Forestry Center as part of the Portland Piano International Summer Festival. This was a one of those rare performances that made this listener feel more alive, more aware, and more appreciative of everything in the world. And Denk accomplished this with a very demanding program (that he changed earlier in the week) that consisted of Ives’s Sonata No. and Bach “Goldberg Variations” (BWV 988). Continue reading Ives and Bach receive transcendent treatment from Denk

The lawn was packed Friday night at Lakeside School, as people took advantage of yet another hot summer night to listen for free under the stars to the sixth Summer Festival concert of Seattle Chamber Music Society. There have been years when more nights were cool and wet than dry and warm, but not this year.

Inside St. Nicholas Hall, it was as packed, but thankfully cooler as the performance got under way with Haydn’s Trio in E Flat major from 1785 with violinist Augustin Hadelich, celllist Edward Arron and pianist Craig Sheppard. The first two are new to the festival this year, Hadelich, 26, being one of this year’s winners of an Avery Fisher award, one of the most prestigious prizes for young musicians (many of those winners play in the SCMS festival, which has one of the most dazzling line ups of young musicians in the country).

Continue reading A viola takes the limelight at Friday’s SCMS concert

Exemplary string players have rarely been in short supply at the Seattle Chamber Music Festival, but in recent years they have become abundant, many brought to the festival by James Ehnes, a first-class violinist himself as well as associate artistic director of the festival. The names of the violinists roll off the tongue, including Stefan Jackiw, Erin Keefe, Soovin Kim, Amy Schwartz Moretti, Stephen Rose and Scott St. John. This year Augustin Hadelich, in his debut festival season, joined the list,

Three of them played Wednesday night at Lakeside School: Hadelich, in Prokofiev; Ehnes, in Beethoven, and Kim, in Chausson. They informed the musical proceedings with their tonal presence, intelligent musicality and keen collaborative insights. Not surprisingly they have the technical resources to make the most of the music at hand. None sounds like the other so uniformity is never an issue. At Wednesday’s concert, there was much to say for the single violist — the admirable Richard O’Neill – and cellists Edward Arron and Robert deMaine. And, of course, the pianists Anna Polonsky, Jeremy Denk and Adam Neiman.

All together an evening to remember.

Continue reading Prokofiev, Beethoven and Chausson well-played Wednesday night at the Seattle Chamber Music Festival