Tag: Review

By Philippa Kiraly

Seattle Chamber Music Society’s summer festival has headed to The Overlake School in Redmond for its final five concerts, the first of which took place in those beautiful surroundings Wednesday night.

But first, the Society’s associate artistic director, James Ehnes, came out to give a tribute to the late George Shangrow, citing his long time support for the festival. In his honor Ehnes then played the largo movement from Bach’s Sonata No. 3 for unaccompanied violin.
Continue reading A tribute to Shangrow and an evening of remarkable music making

By Philippa Kiraly

Despite concerns and trepidation over its move from the bucolic ambiance of Lakeside School to the urban Nordstrom Recital Hall at Benaroya, Seattle Chamber Music Society’s summer festival there has been an undoubted success.

It managed to fill, mostly, over 100 seats more than Lakeside has for each concert and recital. It has brought in a variety of new audience members, including tourists dropping in. And the concerts have been enthusiastically received, despite the sometimes sabotaging effect of the hall’s dry acoustics and the really poor quality piano provided.

While the picnicking area in the Garden of Remembrance suffers from traffic noise, the decibel level in the Nordstrom lobby during intermissions makes some concert goers try to duck out downstairs or by heading to the main Benaroya lobby, and the free lemonade and coffee are missed, these are just peripheral losses.
Continue reading Seattle Chamber Music Society wraps up Seattle festival, heads to Redmond

By R.M. Campbell

There has been so much to admire in the concerts that I’ve attended at the Seattle Chamber Music Festival this season at Nordstrom Recital Hall, it seems redundant to say so yet again. But it is the truth.

As always there are musicians making their festival debut. A more significant new element is the hall, a vast improvement on the dreary acoustics of St. Nicholas Hall at Lakeside School where the festival most of past few decades. This is the festival’s first season at Nordstrom. The more one hears at Nordstrom — the clarity and vibrancy of sound — the more one appreciates the virtues of the new venue. When the festival leaves Seattle next week for Overlake School in Redmond, there will be no lapse in acoustical values. The hall is excellent.
Continue reading Mozart to Barber Wednesday Night at Festival

By the third week of the Chamber Music Society’s festival the excitement of opening week is gone.  We’ve heard enough expertly crafted chamber music to carry us through to the fall.  A number of musicians have come and gone by the third week.   The third week is also when repertory experiments takes place. The chamber pieces which use wind, brass, and double bass tend to show up around this time. New commissions also show up from time to time here too, away from the intensity of opening week.

The third week is especially problematic for writers. Our adjectives are exhausted and an endless supply of Romantic melodies and classical formalities are dancing through the parts of our brain we use to listen to music. We’ve heard a lot of music with even more to come.

This year the third week of the festival ended with back to back evening concerts. Friday’s concert embodied some of the best and the worst of the festival so far. Franz Berwald’s Septet glowered for 20 minutes to start Friday’s concert. It’s a piece without much of a point even when it is played well as it was on Friday night.  I would have preferred to hear Jeff Fair (horn); Sean Osborne (clarinet); Seth Krimsky (bassoon); Jordan Anderson (bass); Ida Levin (violin); Che-Yen Chen (viola); and Jeremy Turner’s (cello) use their considerable talents in different repertory.
Continue reading A lot of good and some bad close out third week of SCMS festival

By R.M. Campbell

The inaugural season of the Seattle Chamber Music Festival in its new home — Nordstrom Recital Hall — has gotten off to a splendid beginning. The first concert Monday night was a major success, even with the absence of pianist Andrew Armstrong because of an infection in his leg. The second concert, on Wednesday, with Armstrong still out and in the hospital, was also a concert with considerable merit.

Arnold Schoenberg’s “Verklarte Nacht” (“Transfigured Night”) was the major piece on the program, and it was played as such by violinists James Ehnes and Augustin Hadelich; violists Cynthia Phelps and Richard O’Neill, and cellists Bion Tsang and Robert deMaine. The work, originally written for string sextet in 1899 and recast by the composer 18 years later for string orchestra is among the most admired pieces Schoenberg ever wrote. It is a coupling of late romanticism and early modernism. Schoenberg wrote some of the most challenging music of the 20th century: it is also some of the most despised. There is nothing to despise — or fear, to use Steven Lowe’s term in his excellent program notes — in “Verklarte Nacht.” This is real 19th-century program music, with a distinct narrative.
Continue reading Music of Romantic era dominates festival on second night