Top chamber musicians to play Summer Solstice Music Festival
Edmonton has a festival for just about every kind of music, but it is gratifying that it has one for a less obvious summer fare — classical chamber music.
The quality of chamber music in Edmonton — both homegrown, and in the calibre of visiting Canadian and international artists during the season — has been one of Edmonton’s little-sung musical success stories. The Edmonton Chamber Music Society has played a large part in that, and its Summer Solstice Music Festival, running from June 22 to 25, continues that quality into the summer.
The festival has a combination of a major piano recital, a visiting string quartet and chamber music concerts, as well as recitals by young Edmontonians and community outreach events.
In last year’s festival the visiting string quartet, the Fine Arts Quart, was one of the world’s most mature and most celebrated. The quartet this year comes from the other end of the spectrum. The Attacca Quartet is one of the most exciting of the new generation of young string quartets. It was formed at the Juilliard School in 2003 and New York is now their home. It has won major international prizes, spent the 2014-2015 season as the Quartet in Residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and has received rave reviews for its recordings.
The quartet’s repertoire is adventurous and very wide-ranging.
“I think their versatility is great,” said the festival’s director, Patricia Tao. “They’ve recorded all of John Adams’ works for string quartet, as well as the complete Haydn quartets. And now they’re working on the complete Beethoven quartets.”
Their centrepiece concert at the University of Alberta’ s Convocation Hall on Friday (June 23, 7:30 p.m.) includes Mendelssohn’s passionate String Quartet No. 2 and Beethoven’s own favourite among
his late quartets, No. 14 in C sharp minor, Op.131.
Canadian music is a major theme of this year’s festival and the Attacca will perform a striking and energetic work by Canadian composer Kelly-Marie Murphy. Dark Energy is inspired by the astronomical concept first postulated by Einstein, and was premièred in Banff in 2007.
The day before (Thursday, June 22, 8 p.m.) the Quartet will play in a very different venue, the Yellowhead Brewery. Concerts there have become a feature of the Summer Solstice Festival, the combination of music, food, and beer attracting a younger audience to come and experience chamber music.
Tao has given the quartet free range on what it wants to play at the brewery and, given its eclectic repertoire (it recently opened for two Electric Light Orchestra concerts), it promises to be an entertaining and interesting evening.
The festival opens with a blockbuster of a piano recital on Thursday (June 21, 7:30 p.m.), given by the Polish-Canadian pianist Krzysztof Jablonski. He has had a distinguished international career spanning three decades and teaches both in Alberta (at Mount Royal College in Calgary), and in Warsaw, where he regularly performs.
His concert consists of four painterly masterpieces of the piano repertoire, opening with works from French Impressionism — Debussy’s delightful Children’s Corner, evoking the childhood and toys of his three-year old daughter, and Ravel’s Jeux d’eau and Gaspard de la nuit.
The second half is devoted to Mussorgsky’s vivid and extensive tone-poem for piano, Pictures at an Exhibition. It may, perhaps, be more familiar in the version orchestrated by Ravel, but the original is a tour-de-force of piano writing, describing various pictures in a memorial exhibition of paintings by Mussorgsky’s friend Viktor Hartmann.
Saturday sees a midday concert at the Art Gallery of Alberta, with the exciting 23-year old Canadian violinist Timothy Chooi who, among other competition successes, has won prizes at the famed International Yehudi Menuhin Violin Competition.
He already has an international career and regularly appears with his older brother, the violinist Nikki Chooi.
He joins the assistant principal violist of the Calgary Philharmonic, Marcin Swoboda, and the new assistant principal cellist of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, Brian Yoon. Their program includes solo string works by Canadian composers, Beethoven’s ‘Eyeglass’ Duo for violin and cello, and Dohnányi’s much-loved Serenade for String Trio.
For the final concert (Sunday, June 25, 7:30 p.m.), Chooi, Swoboda, and Yoon are joined by the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra’s concertmaster, Robert Uchida, and Patricia Tao herself on piano. Their program is a varied one, from the baroque, through the Romantics (Schumann’s Piano Quintet and a Grieg violin sonata), to a piece by one of Canada’s most impressive composers, Alexina Louie. Bringing the Tiger Down from the Mountain II is a virtuoso and evocative piece for cello and piano that so impressed Pinchas Zukerman that he requested an orchestral version of it for the National Arts Centre Orchestra.
The festival continues its excellent promotion of young chamber music players in pre-concert recitals. Wednesday (June 21) features pianists and Sunday (June 25) a piano trio (both Convocation Hall, 6:45 p.m.).
There are also a number of free outreach events to encourage a love of chamber music. They include performances by violinist Maya Budzinski and cellist Jonah Hansen at Callingwood Farmers’ Market (Sunday, June 18, 10 a.m.), while violinist Gabrielle Desprès plays at the Strathcona Farmers’ Market (Saturday, June 24, 8.30 and 9.30 am). Jablonski gives a master class open to the public (Thursday, June 22, 10 a.m., Studio 2-7, Fine Arts Building, University of Alberta), and the Attacca Quartet gives a free concert at the CBC Centre Stage in City Centre Mall (Thursday, June 22, 12 p.m.).