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The
Martha's Vineyard Times is a weekly publication.
June 30 - July 6, 2005 Edition
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Music:
Chamber Society blooms for summer June 30, 2005
A roster of celebrated musicians will be joining artistic director Delores Stevens for the series of July and August concerts, presented at 8 pm on Mondays at the Old Whaling Church in Edgartown and Tuesdays at the Chilmark Community Center. Appearances by guest ensembles – the Infiniti Brass Quintet on July 11 and 12, and the Biava String Quartet on August on August 15 and 16 – will open and conclude the season. Two ambitious programs stand out in the chamber society’s summer 2005 calendar. On Saturday, July 30 the society will present a special family concert, its first program ever at the Tabernacle on the campgrounds in Oak Bluffs. The centerpiece of this event will be Camille Saint-Saens’s “Carnival of the Animals,” involving young performers from the Vineyard community. To accommodate families, this program will be presented at the earlier hour of 7 pm. And on Monday and Tuesday, August 8 and 9, the chamber society will present the world premiere of “Concerto a Tre,” a new piece commissioned by the society and written by the noted composer William Kraft. Ms. Stevens, who has been a committed advocate for contemporary music throughout her career as a pianist, said she believes that commissioning new work is an important part of the chamber music society’s mission. “Just as I like to program young and emerging artists,” Ms. Stevens said this week, “I’ve always enjoyed presenting new music. I take seriously the work of composers, and right now we’re in a very interesting time for music. For so long we were under the spell of Mr. Schoenberg, but now we have music of great ingenuity occurring. This is music that incorporates world music, it incorporates jazz, it uses different instrumentation — it’s very difficult to pigeonhole.” Mr. Kraft, a percussionist by training, for many years chaired the composition department at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He has served as composer-in-residence for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and he has written commissioned work for such notable clients as the Kronos Quartet, the Library of Congress and the Boston Pops. His new piece for the Island chamber society is written for violin, percussion, and piano. In his program notes, the composer says, “It was, indeed, a challenge to integrate these three instruments, which have such contrasting idiomatic characteristics. This integration is what became fascinating in the composing of ‘Concerto a Tre,’ and it seems that this fascination suffers by writing about it because, as Samuel Beckett once put it, ‘only music can penetrate the veil of its own existence.’” The performance of the “Carnival of the Animals” at the Tabernacle is an effort to reach out to the broader Vineyard community in a new way. The “Carnival” is a set of orchestral pieces, each one catching the character of a particular animal, from the regal and swaggering lion to a jittery flock of chickens, from lumbering elephants to leaping kangaroos. Each child taking part in the July 30 program will write a poem about an animal, will paint a picture of it, and will develop movements for performance during the concert. The poems and pictures will also be incorporated into the stage presentation. According to Diane Wall of West Tisbury, president of the chamber society, plans for the Tabernacle program evolved during brainstorming sessions of the board this past winter. “The idea was really two-fold,” she said this week. “It started as an effort to reach out and broaden our audience across the Island and across the generations, and it was Susan Phelps’s idea to try to use the Tabernacle as a venue. And it turns out that Dee Stevens’s daughter, Victoria, has done the “Carnival of the Animals” as a project two times before in Los Angeles, working with inner-city children with great success. She will be the teacher working with children in this program.” Two other performances will highlight the 2005 summer concert season. July 18 and 19, The Ives String Quartet, joined by Ms. Stevens at the piano, will perform music by Ravel, Mozart, and Shostakovich. The Ives quartet, which was known as the Stanford String Quartet from 1983 to 1998, has performed to acclaim from San Francisco to New York and from Taiwan to London. It has released recordings on the Music and Arts, Laurel Records, and AIX labels. On July 25 and 26, the Chilmark Piano Quartet with flutist Susan Greenberg will perform music by Mozart, Beethoven, Strauss, and Muczynski. Ms. Greenberg, principal flutist for Symphony in the Glen, works with Ms. Stevens as co-artistic director of Chamber Music Palisades in California. She is a member of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and has been a guest soloist with numerous symphonies. One final note: Concert-goers might be pleased to discover that there is rather more of Mozart on the programs this summer than in years past. This, said Ms. Stevens, is to celebrate the composer’s 250th birthday. Martha’s Vineyard Chamber Music Society concerts begin Monday, July 11 and continue Monday and Tuesday evenings through Aug. 16 with an additional concert at the Tabernacle on Saturday, July 30. For more information, call 508-696-8055 or visit www.mvcms.vineyard.net. |
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