Tag: Chamber Music

Mikhail Shmidt discusses Icebreaker V: Love and War

Starting Friday, the Seattle Chamber Players embark on their fifth Icebreaker festival – “Love and War.” While other Icebreakers have focused on American, Russian, and Baltic contemporary music, the latest festival centers on Western Europe. Mikhail Shmidt, one of SCP’s founding members spoke with me about the festival. You can watch and hear Shmidt’s thoughts below.

Mikhail Shmidt discusses SCP’s Icebreaker V from gatheringnote on Vimeo.

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A Simple Measure of good music can be satisying…

By Philippa Kiraly

One of its biggest audiences ever filled the little Chapel at the Good Shepherd Center in Wallingford Monday night, for the last of Simple Measure’s Fire-themed concerts. (We had Earth earlier this season, the Air group take place in April, the Water ones in May.)

It’s possible part of the draw was the return visit to Seattle of Alex Klein, the brilliant Brazilian oboist who taught at UW in the 1990s, then became principal oboist of the Chicago Symphony until he contracted focal dystonia, a neurological condition which caused weakness and unreliability in two of his fingers.

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Auryn Quartet Makes Auspicious Debut

By any count, today is a golden age for string quartets. Dozens of groups of international standing ply the concert platform on several continents. One of those, founded nearly 30 years ago, made a belated debut at Meany Hall Thursday night.

The Auryn Quartet began life in Germany and is now based in Cologne. It has toured widely, in Europe and North and South America as well as Australia and Asia. The group’s recordings are equally impressive with complete cycles of the Beethoven and Schubert and Brahms quartets and Haydn to be finished just down the road. All together more than 150 string quartets have entered its repertory with about 100 chamber music works – trios to octets – performed with all sorts of eminent musicians and ensembles such as the Guarneri and Amadeus, with whom the Auryn studied, and the Prazak.

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Winter Festival closes its 2010 season Sunday

By R.M. Campbell

Just as the summer festival of the Seattle Chamber Music Society has taken a quantum leap in excellence over the past few years, so has the winter festival. The four-day event, which concluded Sunday afternoon with a splendid concert, gave evidence to that claim. This is the first year in nearly 30 in which both festivals will be held in the same place — Nordstrom Recital Hall. Home to summer event for most of its life, Lakeside School, and its pastoral calm, is no longer available to the festival. After a long search, Nordstrom was selected for its size, excellent acoustical properties and central location. There is room to grow in this hall, where there was none in St. Nicholas Hall, a smaller, less commodious and acoustically deficient venue. Officials have already been working on improving the extra-concert hall accommodations. I have no doubt that will be accomplished by summer — the festival opens July 5 — I believe people will readily embrace the new facility. If they want a bucolic ambience, they can attend concerts at Overlake School in Redmond, a summer Eastside branch of the main festival. Not only is there a handsome campus, the acoustics of its hall are superb.

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Turina surprises and the Trout inspires at SCMS’s Friday concert

Pianist Anna Polonsky. Photo, Shirley Singer.

The Seattle Chamber Music Society, and its stable of talented instrumentalists, continued its winter festival this past Friday.  This year, the winter festival is celebrating the 200th anniversary of Robert Schumann’s birthday. The classical proportioned Second Piano Trio was the Schumann selection on Friday night. On either side of the trio were two pieces — one familiar, the other less so — Franz Schubert’s famous Trout Quintet and Joaquin Turina’s Piano Quartet.

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Happy birthday Mozart! SSO members present a delightful tribute

By Dana Wen

This week marks the 254th anniversary of Mozart’s birth, kicking off commemorative concerts across the globe. Here in Seattle, members of the Seattle Symphony presented a delightful program of the great composer’s chamber music to celebrate the event. The well-attended Tuesday night recital, a day before Mozart’s birthday on January 27, was held in Benaroya Hall’s intimate Nordstrom Recital Hall. It was a pleasant surprise to see the room so full on a cold weeknight. The enthusiasm of the crowd served as a testament to the success of the Seattle Symphony’s small chamber music series. This Mozart tribute proved to be no exception to this rule. The four works on the program did an excellent job of showcasing the symphony’s talent while representing various sides of Mozart’s personality.

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A Toast to Mozart

Celebrating Mozart on his birthday Wednesday in a Town Hall concert, pianist Byron Schenkman and several colleagues enlivened their performances with raffle drawings for an audience already enjoying wine and chocolates. Downstairs at Town Hall was jammed with people skipping the last part of the State of the Union speech to be there and the atmosphere was cheerfully festive.

The performances, of Mozart works mostly from the composer’s late teens and very early twenties, were of generally high level as one would expect from anything Schenkman does, but within that the results were uneven.

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Happy (belated) birthday Beethoven

The piece still retained the geniality of the first half’s Serenade and Quintet. Like Bryant, Yablonsky was an assured leader. The Septet is sometimes lead by a conductor, for this performance the musicians turned to Yablonsky for their cues. Yablonsky was also at home in the piece’s violin solos, equaling the vim and vigor of the work. She was helped by balanced, soft edged playing from the winds and horn. DiLorenzo’s playing maintained the same stylishness and plush tone from the beginning of the concert to the end.

With this early Beethoven concert behind them, the SSO will turn its attention to the pinnacle of the composer’s late period – the Ninth Symphony. The annual, end of year performances, of the Ninth attracts large, adoring audiences. On purely musical terms, the Ninth is a stark counterpoint to the smiling air of his early chamber music. The story of Beethoven’s compositional life began with pieces like the Septet and Serenade, but ends, later in the month, with the still unsurpassed Ninth.

Alan Gilbert and New York Phil make CONTACT!

By Gigi Yellen

Writing from New York, where an exemplary innovation in music programming launched tonight in a hall you might know as the home of that radio show “Selected Shorts.” The Peter Norton Symphony Space holds about 750 people; looked like at least 600 came out for the launch of “Contact!” a new-music series conceived by New York Philharmonic Music Director Alan Gilbert and curated by the Philharmonic’s composer-in-residence, Magnus Lindberg.

The composers Arlene Sierra, Lei Liang, Marc-André Dalbavie and Arthur Kampela received the commissions for this first pair of concerts in the series. (The concert repeats Dec. 20 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.) Dressed in casual black like the musicians (and all but one of the composers—hang on), Lindberg addressed the audience, introducing each piece by doing a short interview with its composer: a couple of hand-held microphones, a couple of stools stage left, a couple of comfortable minutes.

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