Fest celebrates ‘portability’ of chamber music
The fourth annual Phoenix Chamber Music Society Festival will make its way from American Lutheran Church to Taliesen West, the Desert Botanical Garden, the Musical Instrument Museum and Camelback Bible Church this month.
We caught up with director David Shifrin to talk about the highlights of a festival he says he first suggested to the Phoenix Chamber Music Society as “a nice thing to do” for the 50th anniversary of the group during the 2009-2010 season.
For the festival’s fourth year, Shifrin says, “We’ve kind of married it to the Chamber Music Society’s subscription series and made one of the concerts on the subscription series at Camelback Church part of the festival. Then, we surrounded that performance with concerts in really interesting venues all over town that are really a testament to the flexibility, the versatility, the portability of chamber music as an art form.”
Here’s Shifrin on five of those performances.
American Lutheran Church
“This will be a trio recital for the somewhat unusual instrumentation of clarinet, viola and piano. Of course, the first great work for that combination was by Mozart. He wrote it for himself to play viola. His favorite student played piano in the first performance, and one of his closest friends was a clarinetist. So he wrote it for them. And it kind of exemplifies many of the wonderful aspects of chamber music — music for friends to be played in intimate spaces.
“In this case, the trio is (composed) of myself with Nokuthula Ngwenyama, one of the great viola players in the world, who happens to live in Phoenix, and Mary Pendleton Hoffer, a pianist who happens to have been a classmate of mine in high school. She was the first pianist I ever played
that trio with. And of course, Mary is a real musical luminary in Phoenix. That program will also have a wide range of repertory, including some duos. So we’re going to explore all the color possibilities of those three instruments.”
Taliesin West
“I did ... research into Frank Lloyd Wright’s relationship with music, and it really opened up quite a vista to learn that he had such a musical upbringing and that his father was indeed a composer. So we’re going to be programming some piano works of William Carey Wright. Ann Marie McDermott has agreed to learn some really romantic virtuoso piano music of William Carey Wright that was written very early in the 20th century. And that will be surrounded by the works of Bach and Beethoven, which I read were played routinely in the Wright home when Frank Lloyd Wright was growing up, and they’re two of his favorite composers.
“Then, I read some quotes about music from Frank Lloyd Wright’s memoirs that he felt that much of his architecture mirrored the music of Ludwig Van Beethoven. There was always a piano in his home, and he felt the structure of a piano, the inside and outside of the piano, influenced some of his vision for structures and building. So we’re going to be doing a Bach violin sonata and Beethoven’s ‘Kreutzer‘ sonata for violin and piano.”
Desert Botanical Garden
“We’re really hoping for perfect weather, because we’ve scheduled a harmony music concert outdoors that harks back to the harmony music form that was so popular in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. We’ll be playing the music of Beethoven and Mozart for eight winds, including a suite of arias from Mozart’s ‘Don Giovanni.’
“This is sort of the pivotal concert because it is part of the subscription series. We’ve taken advantage of having Anne-Marie McDermott there, and a pianist that will be passing through from Australia on her way to Tucson, Bernadette Harvey. We’ll be hearing Brahms’ famous ‘Hungarian Dances for Piano Four Hands.’ The theme for that program will be Hungarian, Gypsy and Slavic folk traditions. It will include these wonderful pieces from Witold Lutoslawski from the 1950s that kind of reflect the Eastern European folkmusic idiom, and of course Bela Bartok’s ‘Contrasts for Clarinet, Violin