After a long intermission, music is back at Castleton
The Chamber Players take to the stage once again on Friday night
On Friday evening, the Castleton Chamber Players will perform for a live audience — for the very first time since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic 15 months ago.
On Friday evening, the Castleton Chamber Players will perform for a live audience — for the very first time since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic 15 months ago.
The hour-long concert will take place at the Theatre House at Castleton Farms and will feature the rarely-performed Brahms Horn Trio for piano, violin and horn.
Violinist Eric Silberger and cellist Daniel Lelchuk first started the Castleton Chamber Players in 2011 with the help of the late conductor and composer Lorin Maazel, who founded the Castleton Festival in the 1990s. In 2013, pianist Bradley Moore joined Silberger and Lelchuk, and the trio has been performing together ever since, both here in Rappahannock and farther afield.
From the moment the pandemic brought live performances to an abrupt halt in March, Moore, who also is the assistant conductor for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, said he has spent much of his time alone in his studio apartment in the city. “Many, many days go by during this pandemic where I don’t actually say anything to another person,” Moore said. “So to get to be living in a house with friends and making music — it’s incredibly moving. And we’re so excited we’re going to get a public audience.”
On Friday, Silberger, Lelchuk and Moore will be joined by Daniel Hawkins, a horn player for the San Francisco Symphony.
For much of the past year Hawkins has lived in Tyler, Texas, a small city in the eastern part of the state. When Texas suffered a major power crisis in February, Hawkins said his was among the hundreds of thousands of homes that lost electricity and water for “a good week and a half.”
The pandemic has been hard on classical musicians — even those who weren’t impacted by the deep freeze in the Lone Star State. The industry practically vanished, leaving many artists isolated and out of work. “It’s heavy,” Moore said. “[The pandemic] was this huge horrible thing we were all experiencing together. It was so heavy for the career to fall apart. … our whole industry just stopped, so that was hard to process.”
While some recording musicians were able to simulate playing together by combining individual tracks they recorded in their respective homes, Moore likened it to “high-end karaoke.”
“It’s just not nearly the same,” Hawkins added.
Silberger explained that it’s virtually impossible to play music over Zoom or video conference. “For different instruments you have different sound delays,” he said. “So for a bass player you might see a movement first, but the sound takes a little bit longer to come out of a bass than a violin.
And everyone has a different breath, some faster, some slower,” Silberger continued. “And if you see a cue, sometimes to coordinate that you have to figure out how early you give that cue or you try to anticipate when people are going to react.”
“The long and the short of it is that music is supposed to be done in person,” Lelchuk said.
And now that COVID-19 vaccines are available, the musicians are able to play in person at Castleton Farms once more. In preparation for their concerts, these musicians live together, eat together and rehearse together. And that’s part of what makes Castleton such a unique and special place for musicians to hone their art.
“We started with the idea of bringing the core of the Castleton Chamber Players in combination with other invited musicians … to bring them here for nine days, a couple weeks, four weeks, just to be fully immersed in this place where there are no distractions,” said Dietlinde Turban Maazel, the artistic director of the Castleton Festival.
“The whole point of having a passionate, heated rehearsal is you can get in those intense discussions, but then afterwards … you go and have a meal together that’s very special. That’s part of the Castleton thing,” Lelchuk said.
At the dinner table, the musicians get to know each other on a deeper level. One night this week, Lelchuk said, the conversation meandered from the relationship between Taiwan and China to tomato sauce recipes to the Verde string quartet.
And though they have frequent disagreements, the musicians are united in their love for performance. “The thing about making music for a live audience is that the audience starts to breathe together whether they realize it or not,”
Moore said. “There’s some kind of ineffable energy thing that happens with a roomful of people and music making.”
“It has to do with communicating and being not on a screen and being with other humans again,” Hawkins added. There’s something — like, you can’t explain it. … That’s music, that’s being human, and that’s something we’ve all not had for the last year plus.”
After a rehearsal on Monday, the musicians said they were feeling emotional about playing again together in the same room, at the same time, on the same stage. “This is my first time playing with another human being since March of last year,” Hawkins said. “I was getting, like, goosebumpy and trying to hold back some tears a while ago … It’s great to be able to play this kind of music, especially the Brahms Horn Trio. It’s one of our main staple pieces — we don’t have that many chamber works, but luckily Brahms wrote that beautiful piece.”
Written in 1865, the Horn Trio is generally believed to be a commemoration of the composer’s mother, who died earlier that year. And the opus is special not only for Hawkins, but for Lelchuk, Silberger and Moore, too — it was the first piece they ever performed together in 2013. Hear it again, or for the first time, on Friday.
Join the Castleton Chamber Players on April 16, from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the Theatre House at Castleton Farms. Attendance is limited to 40 people and seating is first come, first served. Tickets are $60 per person; student tickets are available for $25. Attendees must comply with COVID-19 safety protocols, wear a mask, physically distance, and perform a self health assessment. For more information or to purchase tickets online, go to www.castletonfestival.org/ccpevent/. Tickets can also be purchased at the Box Office at 540-937-3454. Another concert is scheduled for April 22 with program details forthcoming.