Category: Seattle Chamber Music Society

Toby Saks, artistic director of Seattle Chamber Music Society has a permanent programming puzzle.

Every year, she has 20 concerts of chamber music to arrange: 12 at Lakeside School and five at Overlake School for the Summer Festival, plus three for the Winter Interlude at Benaroya in January. That’s about 60 chamber music works which include strings: trios, quartets, quintets and sextets, some duets and even the occasional octet. (This doesn’t include the 20 recital programs of solos or duets.)

Take a reasonable six-year cycle and that’s 360 different pieces of chamber music. How to find that many stellar works? How to bring variety in programs?

Continue reading Great music and lesser works both shine at Overlake.

It’s the last Overlake School week of this year’s Seattle Chamber Music Society’s Summer Festival and for the first time in this sunny as well as stellar six weeks of music, it rained. Lightly to be sure, but it didn’t keep away concertgoers who packed the hall to hear yet another superbly-presented evening of musicmaking.

Returning pianist Orion Weiss gave the recital, with Mendelssohn’s first book of “Lieder ohne Worte” (“Songs without Words”), followed by the Scherzo from his “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” transcribed by Rachmaninoff.

Continue reading Rain can’t repel music lovers

Even as the Seattle Chamber Music Society’s Lakeside Festival was wrapping up, organizers and audience members were busy evaluating the festival’s future home – Nordstrom Recital Hall. After 28 years, the Seattle festival is moving from the Lakeside School on the Shoreline/Seattle border to downtown.

If the summer festival were exactly like SCMS’s winter festival there wouldn’t be as much uncertainty about the location. SCMS has successfully used the Nordstrom Recital Hall for a number of years now. Musicians mostly like the venue. Opinions, however, are mixed on the hall’s acoustics. And the audience appreciates the proximity to parking and other downtown amenities. But that is for the winter festival, when Seattle’s weather tends to be unpleasant and dark.

Continue reading Previewing the 2010 SCMS Seattle festival

Adam Neiman is one of the musicians with the longest history at the Seattle Chamber Music Society’s summer festival.  Neiman came to the festival in 1997 as a 19 year old just beginning his career as a pianist.  He sat down with me moments before the final Lakeside School began to talk about his time at the festival, the need to preserve and play the music of lost romantic composers, and shared his insights on what makes a composer inspired.  Neiman also shared his memories of working with Toby Saks — the festival’s co-artistic director — and the move to Benaroya Hall next year.

There is an amusing out take from this interview I plan on sharing on The Gathering Note.  As Adam and I were talking, Ran Dank, a new pianist with the festival, walked through the rear door, introduced himself, and seemed perplexed about how to describe Bach’s French Suite — a piece he learned when he was 7.  Dank played the piece as part of the free Friday recital.

On Friday evening Seattle Chamber Music Society’s Summer festival held its final performance in the serene surroundings of Lakeside School. No more leisurely picnics beside the playing field, no intermissions under the evening sky in the little courtyard outside St. Nicholas Hall.

But hold on. This coming week and the one after you can still have all that ambience if you drive to The Overlake School in Redmond, which has an equally lovely campus including a picnic area and a small jewel of a concert hall, to hear another five recital/concert performances.

SCMS has known for sometime that it would have to leave Lakeside, and has been looking everywhere for a similar venue. There hasn’t been one, or not one which was available at the right times in the right place and which had a concert hall a tad bigger than the one at Lakeside (SCMS has been bursting out of that for several years).

Continue reading Farewell, Lakeside

Before last night’s Seattle Chamber Music Society recital and concert got underway the festival’s stage manager gave the audience welcome news – Saint Nicholas Hall was air conditioned. Unlike the concerts from earlier in the month, Wednesday evening was unpleasant weather-wise. Seattle suffered under 100 degree temperatures and it seemed, based on my observation of the lawn and dinner crowd, the heat persuaded many long-time fans of the festival to stay home.

Wednesday’s concert demonstrated once again what the festival does well – marrying expert musicians with diverse repertoire.

Continue reading SCMS musicians face Wednesday’s record breaking heat with cool-headed playing

It may be a little early to get out the handkerchiefs to say goodbye to Lakeside School, which has been home to the Seattle Chamber Music Festival for nearly 30 years. At the time of its beginnings, this quasi-pastoral setting in north Seattle was as much a novelty in the summer cultural life of Seattle as the festival itself. The setting and concerts established all sorts of local precedents. From that modest two-weeks of concerts, the festival grew to include a winter festival and an Eastside branch at Overlake School in Redmond.

Continue reading Music of Haydn, Brahms and Bartok opens the final week of the Seattle Chamber Music Festival at Lakeside

The evening weather was glorious—again—and the lawn and auditorium at Lakeside School were packed—again—as the ninth recital and concert of Seattle Chamber Music Society’s Summer Festival got under way. It’s getting almost old hat to say that performance and ambiance shone, but they did.

Only one work on Friday’s program was quite familiar and that mostly from recordings: Brahms’ Trio for horn, violin and piano in E-Flat major. The Seattle Symphony’s Jeffrey Fair took the hornist’s part, with Stefan Jackiw playing violin and Jeremy Denk, piano, and it was fascinating to hear the juxtaposition of those very different instrumental timbres. Violin and horn can both create a rich smoothness and depth, but where Fair’s horn is velvet, Jackiw’s violin is silk and he can, and did, achieve an extraordinary range of nuance not as available to the horn.

Continue reading Three fine works and one forgettable one at Lakeside

Last night’s Lakeside concert was preceded by a recital by pianist Jeremy Denk.  Denk tossed off three of Gyorgy Ligeti’s Book One etudes — Cordes a vide, Fanfares, and Arc-en-ciel.  To help with the etudes, Denk also programmed Debussy and Liszt.  Liszt’s “Rhapsodie espagnole” was a raucous affair, but for me, there was plenty of razzle-dazzle in the etudes — especially in Fanfares, the fourth Book One etude.  J, my frequent concert companion, preferred Arc-en-ciel for its Debussy-like qualities.  The beauty of the Ligeti etudes is how they synthesize Lisztian knuckle-busting difficulty with impressionistic color.

There are a handful of recordings of the Book One and Book Two etudes and at least one complete recording of the complete Book Three etudes.  Pierre Laurent-Aimard’s recording on Sony is probably the best.  Idil Biret’s Naxos recording is good — technically — but antiseptic.  Aimard’s effort is technically very good, but also he seems to understand the composer better.  Perhaps that’s why Aimard was Ligeti’s pianist of choice for the Sony recording.

If you didn’t see the recital or hear it on KING-FM I’m sorry.

Ligeti was one of the true masters of the last century and continued to influence composition up until he died in 2006.  There aren’t too many pianists carrying Ligeti’s etudes around with them or even willing to tackle them.

If you want a taste of what you missed check out the following video of Aimard performing a selection of Ligeti’s etudes.

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