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Portland Press Herald
Posted July
29, 2019
Seal
Bay Festival deftly displays contemporary works
The
concert, featuring two Maine composers among others,
was Thursday at Space Gallery.
By Allan Kozinn
Because touring musicians who steer clear
of Maine in the winter flock here in the summer,
chamber music festivals are plentiful, each with
a distinct personality. Some are shaped by the
mix of performers on hand and the repertory they
bring; others pursue specific repertory agendas.
The Seal Bay Festival, which offers concerts in
Portland, Brunswick, Belfast, Waterville,
Topsham and Yarmouth over a 10-day run (this
year’s started on July 10), concentrates on
American chamber music, often with Maine
composers featured. And because the composers
are usually on the festival’s roster, the
concerts are only the tip of the iceberg.
Between them, more established composers mentor
their younger colleagues, and the festival’s
musicians rehearse and perform their works, and
offer practical advice about performance issues.
The festival, in the form of its resident
ensemble, the Cassatt String Quartet, and
pianist Ursula Oppens, paid its annual visit to
Space Gallery on Thursday evening, and presented
six new (or, in two cases, newly revised) works.
All six composers were on hand to introduce
their scores. An undercurrent of social and
political commentary framed the program. In the
opener, “Your Questions Online” (2019),
Alejandro Rutty muses on the parallel lives we
live now, split between our direct interactions
in the physical world, and the personalities we
project online, where thoughtful or moving
comments intermingle with frivolous questions
and observations. The two connected movements of
Rutty’s piece, a string quartet, were inspired
by a pair of questions posed online by someone
who first wonders “How Can They Let Children
Die” – a reference to the refugee crisis at our
southern border – and later asks, “Where Can I
Buy a Disco Ball?” Rutty’s language is consonant
and appealing, and he is strongly drawn to
pizzicato scoring. But he also provides the
variety you would expect: The first movement is
packed with melancholy themes that travel
through the full ensemble, with an emphasis on
wrenchingly direct cello and viola lines. The
second is strongly rhythmic, veering between a
mechanistic pummeling that evokes the Disco era
and sinuous figures that embrace everything from
tarantella-like figures to hints of tango – an
argument, in a way, that complexities can thrive
beneath even the most frivolous surfaces. Though
generically named, Laura Kaminsky’s Piano
Quintet (2018), which closed the program, is a
comment on the chaos and brutality of what
passes for political discourse in Trump-era
America. It is not a broadside, exactly.
In “Anthem,” the first movement, Kaminsky
has Oppens and the Cassatt players paint a
diverse but ambiguous portrait of our time, with
chorale-like passages giving way to fleeting
touches of Dvorák-like folksiness and then
uncompromisingly brusque chordal bursts. That
movement leads to “Lamentation; coming into
light,” a plangent movement that touches on
extremes of pensiveness and gloom at one end and
angry, acerbic energy, captured in both the
assertive keyboard writing and tense, often
brash, string writing, at the other. But the
real action is in the finale, “Maelstrom, and …”
which builds on the second movement’s urgency
and tension. Whether by design or coincidence,
the movement includes, near the end, a call for
help in the form of a full quartet figure etched
in three fast, three slow and three fast notes –
the rhythm of an S.O.S. in Morse code – on a
single tone. Kaminsky’s ending is ambiguous: A
quietly energetic, ascending keyboard burst, in
the work’s final seconds, could be taken as a
sign of hope. But you could also hear it as a
question – specifically, where do we go from
here?
Between Rutty’s and Kaminsky’s social
commentaries, the program offered thoughtful, if
less time-sensitive, meditations. An innocent
lyricism was the driving force of Daniel Strong
Godfrey’s “Paginula” (2018), a gentle but
spirited and attractive score for violin (the
Cassatt’s first violinist, Muneko Otani) and
piano, as well as Michael Alec Rose’s “Seventh
String Quartet – Maine Title: Sun, Sea, Land”
(2018). Rose noted that although he lives in
Nashville, Tennessee, he has long been
fascinated by the landscapes and watercolors of
Maine painter John Marin. The quartet, named for
one of Marin’s works, is a sweetly harmonized
piece, often with surprising melodic turns
animating his rich, inviting themes.
The two works by Maine composers were
strikingly different. Daniel Sonenberg’s “The
Sirens of Sombor” (2008, revised 2019) is an
essentially lyrical score, with touches of
modernist angularity and, at one point, bluesy
figures, tempering its overt Romanticism. Vineet
Shende’s “… and round thy phantom glue my
clasping arms” (2004, revised 2019) explores a
complex psychological moment, when belief gives
way to disillusionment, which in turn leads to
reconsideration and growth. Shende’s lightly
acidic language, leavened by intriguing themes
and a bag of timbral tricks that includes string
slides and dynamic swells, as well as stark
contrasts between murky string backdrops and
sparkling keyboard lines, is perfectly suited to
the task. Reviews of all-contemporary programs
invariably focus more on the works than the
performances, but the difficulty of playing them
persuasively should not be underestimated. The
Cassatts and Oppens are experienced hands at
this, and it would be hard to imagine these
works played more eloquently.
Allan Kozinn is a former music critic and
culture writer for The New York Times who lives
in Portland. He can be contacted at:
allankozinn@gmail.com
Twitter: kozinn
Portland Press Herald
Posted July
20, 2018
Concert
review: Clarinetist, Cassatt Quartet showcase works by
Seal Bay Festival faculty
The
concert, featuring two Maine composers among others,
was Thursday at Space Gallery.
The
Seal Bay Festival is now in its 16th season, and I
have never encountered another festival quite like it.
Its focus is contemporary American chamber music, but
at heart, it is as much about teaching as performing.
With the superb Cassatt Quartet as its resident
ensemble, the festival assembles a faculty of
established composers to mentor a slate of promising
students. The students’ works are presented alongside
the faculty’s music in concerts at schools, hospitals,
retirement centers and art galleries as the festival
travels between Portland, Brunswick, Vinalhaven,
Belfast, Waterville, Topsham and Yarmouth.
But
at the festival’s annual concert at Space Gallery, the
student works are set aside, and the faculty takes the
spotlight. This year’s installment, on Thursday
evening, was a program of inventively pictorial recent
scores by five of the eight faculty composers.
Two
of those composers live in Maine, and curiously, both
chose to write solo works for one of the festival’s
guest performers, clarinetist Vasko Dukovski,
rather than for the quartet. Dan Sonenberg’s “Rope
Ladder,” written last month, is for bass clarinet, and
takes full advantage of the instrument’s rich range of
timbres, from low-lying growls to silken, sweet-toned
high passages. The work’s title suggests the imagery
of a precarious climb, and Sonenberg suggests
that, at first, in a rising theme.
But
the piece becomes increasingly athletic, with
sustained tones punctuated by multiphonic (chordal)
bursts, tone-bending figures, and brisk, darting
motifs that sometimes sound cartoonishly picaresque
and even bright, a word that does not typically come
to mind about bass clarinet music.
Vineet Shende’s
inspiration for “At the Lagrangian Point” (2018) came
while reading about space travel to his daughter, and
finding a reference to the Lagrangian point – a point
at which two celestial bodies exert an equal
gravitational force on a smaller object (a satellite,
for example) between them. That made him wonder how
the principle might apply to music.
In
theory, the gravitational forces hold the smaller
object stationary, but portraying that precisely would
undoubtedly make for a dull musical work. Shende,
instead, used musical techniques – syncopation and multiphonics,
for example – to suggest a kind of stability of forces
pulling musical lines in different directions. It
makes sense, but more to the point, he created an
animated, involving piece that a listener could be
swept into without worrying about how (and whether)
the symbolism works.
Dukovski brought
clarity and agility to both works, and also to Gerald
Cohen’s “Voyagers” (2017), in which he joined the
Cassatt players, on several kinds of clarinets, in a
tribute to the two Voyager spacecrafts, launched in
1977 and still hurtling through space. There are, as
you might expect, passages that evoke the eerie
loneliness of the spacecrafts’ journeys. But much of
the work is vigorously animated.
Cohen
based parts of the score on pieces from the Voyagers’
golden discs – selections of music, natural sounds,
speech and photographs, meant to convey an impression
of Earth to distant civilizations that might decode
them. His choices were a Renaissance dance, a
Beethoven quartet and a Hindustani vocal piece, but
though he briefly quotes each, he quickly deconstructs
them and spins imaginative fantasies around their
essential elements in his own freewheeling, largely neo-Romantic
style.
Melinda
Wagner’s “My Tioga” (2014) is a vividly picturesque,
six-movement string quartet based on childhood
memories (Tioga is
the Pennsylvania county where her mother grew up).
Parts of it – the “Damsel Fly,” “Milkweed (Memento Mori)”
and “Little Church in Nauvoo” movements – are slow,
wistful pieces, the last having an arresting,
hymn-like quality. These are offset by lively, often
spiky movements, packed with interplay between the
four musicians.
The
concert’s closing work was “Culai” (2012, revised
2013) by Lev Zhurbin,
a composer and violist who goes by the single name Ljova (pronounced li-OH-va).
Among Ljova’s specialties is the folk music of Eastern
Europe, and in “Culai,” he pays tribute to Nicolae Neacşu,
the violinist and vocalist in the Romanian gypsy
ensemble Taraf de Haďdouks,
with a movement also dedicated to Romica Puceanu,
a renowned singer in the Romani style.
In
a tightly constructed 18 minutes, Ljova conveys
a colorful overview of Roma life, starting with
rough-and-tumble children’s games and ending with
plangent funeral music, with dance movements and
evocations of falling in and out of love, tucked in
between. It is a complex score – for long stretches,
the meter changes nearly every bar – but it captures
the spirit of the style magnificently.
The
Cassatt players dove fully into that spirit, producing
the glissandos,
weeping bent notes, fast, fire-breathing fiddling and
alternately gritty and sumptuous timbres – to say
nothing of the lively dance rhythms – of the classic
gypsy style.
Allan Kozinn is
a former music critic and culture writer for The New
York Times who lives in Portland.
Portland Press Herald
Concert
review: String quartet plays pieces with Maine ties at
Seal Bay Festival
The roaming festival landed at Portland's Space Gallery
on Thursday.
Members of the Cassatt String Quartet, Ah Ling Neu,
viola; Elizabeth Anderson,
cello; Jennifer Leshnower; and Muneko Otani, violins
Photo
by Anna Ablogina
The
Seal
Bay Festival is one of the most interesting and
unusual of coastal Maine’s summer festivals, focusing as
it does on contemporary American chamber music and
encouraging associations between music and the visual
arts. It maintains a strangely low profile, possibly
because of its essentially itinerant nature. Instead of
setting up in a specific place and expecting listeners
to make their way there, Seal Bay travels from town to
town – Portland, Brunswick, Waterville, Yarmouth,
Belfast and Vinalhaven, this summer – presenting
concerts in galleries, hospitals and museums.
One
of its regular stops is Space Gallery, where the
festival’s resident ensemble, the Cassatt
String Quartet, played works by six composers on
Thursday evening, three with strong Maine associations.
One was Elliott Schwartz, the state’s best-known
composer, who died last year; the others were Vineet
Shende, the chair of Bowdoin College’s music
department, and Peter
McLaughlin, an eclectic composer and percussionist
who studied with Schwartz and oversees the music
programming at Space.
CONCERT
REVIEW
WHAT:
Seal Bay Festival presents the Cassatt String
Quartet
WHERE:
Space Gallery, Portland
REVIEWED:
Thursday, July 20
Muneko
Otani, the Cassatts’ first violinist, opened the program
with Shende’s solo violin work, “Prakash Ani Saoli,” a
Marathi title meaning “Luminescence and Shadow.” As its
title implies, it is packed with oppositions, its
luminescence and shadow first taking form as bowed and
pizzicato passages, and then as a stream of contrasting
dynamics, coloration and techniques.
Mostly,
though, you forget about the title and its philosophical
underpinning (Shende, in a pre-concert panel discussion,
explained that you cannot understand light unless you
also understand darkness and vice versa), and you hear
the work as a dazzling showpiece that draws on just
about anything a solo violinist can do – single lines,
both angular and lyrical, as well as chordal passages,
arpeggiated themes, repeating scale figures, left-hand
pizzicato to add texture while the main line is bowed –
without becoming a mere catalogue work. Otani played it
engagingly, making a case for it as a substantial
addition to the repertory for unaccompanied violin.
The
program’s only other solo work was McLaughlin’s “No Sad
Songs (for Elliott),” a tribute to Schwartz for
unaccompanied viola, played with energy and gracefulness
by Ah Ling Neu. In his program note, McLaughlin
described the piece as “simply a vignette,” but he is
selling himself short. The viola line begins as a
plaintive voice, swathed in a resonant ambience that
slowly becomes a full-fledged electronic soundtrack. The
electronics ebb and flow, swamping the viola at times,
working as a textural backdrop elsewhere, and providing
a constantly changing palette throughout.
Both
the Shende and McLaughlin works had their world
premieres at the festival’s Belfast concert on
Wednesday.
Schwartz
was represented by his String Quartet No. 3, “Portrait
(for DeeDee),” a tribute to his wife, the visual
artist Dorothy Schwartz, composed shortly after
her death in 2014.
The
performance was listed as the work’s United States
premiere. Not so. The Portland
String Quartet played it at the Portland
Conservatory’s Back Cove Contemporary Music Festival
in April. But it was great hearing it again (and to see
a broad selection of DeeDee’s inventive artworks,
projected on a screen behind the ensemble). Built partly
on notes derived from DeeDee’s name and with brief
snippets of the couple’s favorite works wafting through
the texture, this is a tender, rich-hued piece in which
humor mingles with an understated sense of loss, all
bound together in warm, consonant textures.
Victoria
Bond‘s “Dreams of Flying” (1994) and Augusta
Read Thomas‘ “Helix Spirals” (2015) both use the
string quartet in picturesque ways. Bond’s four-movement
score turns the ensemble into a flying machine, its
music lifting slowly upward (by way of a simple two-note
figure that rises in pitch through the first movement)
before finding its cruising altitude, and then exploring
a handful of fantasy scenarios, including one inspired
by “Gulliver’s Travels.”
Thomas’s
piece is inspired by the structure of DNA and creates
fascinating imagery through its use of full-ensemble
pizzicato in the first movement and attractively
interwoven, slowly swirling themes through its other two
movements.
The
Cassatt players – Otani and Neu, with violinist Jennifer
Leshnower and cellist Elizabeth Anderson – gave colorful
readings of both works, as well as the program’s final
piece, the brief, propulsive “Intermedio” (1986) by Daniel
Strong Godfrey, the festival’s founding director.
Portland Press Herald
Arts & Entertainment
July 22, 2016
Concert Review: Cassatt String Quartet presents
works bound by an eclectic nature
The quartet performs as the resident ensemble for the
Seal Bay Festival.
By Allan Kozinn
The Seal Bay Festival, now in its 14th season, began
last week with a pair of concerts at Colby College in
Waterville and made its way to Vinalhaven and Belfast
before arriving in Portland for a concluding round of
performances that included a stop at SPACE Gallery on
Thursday evening. The festival's resident ensemble is
the Cassatt String Quartet, a group unusually devoted to
contemporary music, and its programs are almost entirely
built of works by the festival's resident composers.
But the festival is not just about performance. There is
an associated Composer Institute, at which the resident
composers coach younger colleagues. And because the
Cassatt is named for the painter Mary Cassatt, art is a
component, as well. As part of their training, the
students worked with artist and critic Rebecca Allan,
who had them get in touch with their internal Picassos
by drawing and painting, some get in touch with their
internal Picassos by drawing and painting, something
Allan and a few of the student composers explained in a
pre-concert talk in the gallery next door to SPACE's
concert room.
At SPACE, the Cassatt played works by Chris Rogerson,
Hannah Lash, Laura Kaminsky and Dan Visconti, who share
an eclecticism that makes their music accessible but
difficult to label easily. All draw freely on modernist
dissonances and occasional harshness, used expressively
and often pictorially. But they are also given to
stretches of neo-Romantic consonance, and a structural
clarity that, in some cases, gives the music a narrative
arch.
Rogerson's three-movement String Quartet No. 2 (2013)
certainly embraced a narrative sensibility. It was
inspired by Stephen Dunn's poem, "Sweetness," a pained
reflection on loss and grieving. The opening movement
quickly establishes the work's melancholy cast by
drawing on the same tart but inviting harmonic world
that drives Samuel Barber's early scores, but having set
the tone, Rogerson evokes the shifting mood of Dunn's
poem “ a balance of bitterness, acceptance, puzzlement
and gratitude“ by tweaking the music's levels of tension
and relief.
A lighter but harmonically tougher dance piece moves
away from the dourness of the opening movement,
juxtaposing touches of mechanistic, quasi-Minimalist
figuration with slides and pizzicato passages, as well
as soaring, plangent violin themes. But the dark mood is
never dispelled fully. In his finale, Rogerson presents
a chorale, built of emotionally charged chordal writing
of strikingly eloquent simplicity.
Lash's "PULSE-SPACE" (2014) was written with the
expectation that it would be choreographed, and though
that hasn't happened (yet), its impulse toward movement
is clear enough. Lash begins with vehemently bowed
dissonant chords, bound with a unity of purpose that
gradually fragments as the four instruments pull away
from each other. Still, this drift is tightly
circumscribed, and although there is an ebb and flow in
the music's dynamics and harmonic density, the score
never loses its edginess and drive.
Kaminsky's "Rising Tide" (2012 ) was commissioned as
part of an ecological project that brought together
scientists and artists to look at the effects of climate
change. It is meant to be performed with projected art
works by Rebecca Allan, and those might have made the
ecological element clearer than the music alone can.
Still, the four-movement score has an evocative power of
its own.
Its opening movement, "Source of Life (H2O)" begins with
a throaty, cantorial viola line and expands to a fuller,
brighter, slightly acidic texture that offers touches of
painterly grandeur while avoiding references to past
composers' evocations of water. The movements that
follow “ the eerily quiet "Bios," the brisk,
multilayered "Forage" and the lush, melancholy
"Societas" “ range farther afield, and if they did not
necessarily evoke images of melting polar ice caps, they
suggested the drama of a world being irrevocably
transformed, which may be more to the point.
Visconti's "Black Bend" (2003) closed the concert on a
lighter note. A short work, running about five minutes,
the piece is inspired by a turn in the Cuyahoga River,
in Ohio, that local lore holds to be haunted. Visconti
paints the scene vividly, with a hazy opening, harsh
violin attacks and pizzicato cello figures. But he
quickly steers it into another realm. Like his "Lonesome
Road," which was heard here last summer at the Portland
Chamber Music Festival, "Black Bend" melds modernist
techniques and elements of popular music, in this case,
the blues, with the violins contributing the string
bending effects you might expect from a blues guitarist.
Allan Kozinn is a former music critic and culture writer
for The New York Times who lives in Portland.
Village Soup Publication, Knox
County
Arts & Entertainment
July 14, 2016
Seal Bay Festival returns to Midcoast
The 14th Seal Bay Festival of American
Chamber Music, based on Vinalhaven, returns Thursday,
July 14, through Friday, July 22. This year, the
festival explores the theme Seeing Sound. In addition to
public concerts, there are master classes for composers,
as well as a visual arts component. This year's festival
is in memory of former Camden resident John Duffy,
visionary, composer and new music champion; as well as
Thomas Godfrey, teacher, sculptor, architect and father.
The internationally celebrated Cassatt String Quartet
will be featured. Established in 1985, the Cassatt
String Quartet has collaborated with a vast array of
artists and Pulitzer Prize-winning composers.
Named three times by The New Yorker magazine's Best Of
The Year CD Selection, the Cassatt has recorded more
than 25 commercial releases for the Koch, Naxos, New
World, Albany and CRI Labels; and can be found on
YouTube. Scheduled string quartets of the featured guest
composers include Ellen Taaffe Zwilich's "Voyage"; Dan
Visconti's "Black Bend"; Chris Rogerson's String Quartet
No. 2; and Kaminsky's String Quartet No. 6, "Rising
Tide," all Maine premieres, as well as the world
premiere performance of "Pulse-Space" by Hannah Lash.
Rebecca Allan, a New York-based visual artist and art
critic, will lead a workshop in drawing and painting
during the festival, as well as hold pre-concert talks
about the work on exhibit at each gallery where the
Cassatt String Quartet is performing. Immersing
individuals in the making of art, as well as simply in
its appreciation, is an exciting new dimension of the
Seal Bay Music Festival and one that guarantees a
dynamic week of creative discovery for all who
participate.
June 25, 2014
Free concerts in Belfast, Vinalhaven:
Seal Bay Festival, 2014
The 12th Seal Bay Festival of American Chamber Music
will run Monday through Saturday, July 7 through 12,
with performances on Vinalhaven; and in Belfast,
Waterville and Ogunquit.
The festival brings the Manhattan-Âbased Cassatt String
Quartet and living American composers together in
collaboration for a series of concerts on the coast of
Maine to include performances for school children, at
Colby College Museum of Art and the Barn Gallery in
Ogunquit; and four master classes with student
performers and student composers, at Bay Chamber Music
School in Rockport and the Atlantic Music Festival in
Waterville.
The Midcoast concerts are scheduled for Wednesday and
Thursday, July 9 and 10. The free concerts by the
Cassatt String Quartet with guest Lauren Lessing, Colby
College Museum of Art's Merkin Curator of Education,
feature music by George Gershwin; Seal Bay Festival
Director Daniel S. Godfrey; Bruce Adolphe, Director of
Education at Lincoln Center and host of NPR's "Piano
Puzzler"; and Lawrence Dillon from the North Carolina
School for the Arts.
On Wednesday at 7 p.m., the concert will be presented at
Vinalhaven's New Era Gallery, 60 Main St.; for more
information, call 863-Â9351. At 8:45 p.m., there will
be a Rhapsody In Blue fixe-Âprix ($40) dinner with the
artists at Salt Restaurant, 64 Main St.; for
reservations, visit saltvh.com or call 863-Â4444.
On Thursday at 7 p.m., Seal Bay comes to Waterfall Arts,
256 High St., in Belfast; for more information, visit
sealbayfestival.org or call 338-Â2222. Remaining public
events will be: a concert Friday at 7 p.m. in Colby
College's Lorimer Chapel ([888] 704-Â1311, ext. 1); and
a children's Seal Bay Festival, 2014 6/26/2014 Seal Bay
Festival, 2014 - Rockland - Camden - Knox -
Courier-Gazette - Camden Herald http://knox.villagesoup.com/p/seal-bay-festival-2014/1203598
2/21 concert Saturday at 2 p.m. at Ogunquit's Barn
Gallery (646-Â8400). The Cassatt String Quartet returns
to collaborate with resident composers Adolphe and
Dillon, and each program invites the public to interact
casually with both composers and performers. The 2014
theme of New Creative Heights connects music, visual
arts and history, seen through artistic struggle and
triumph.
Seal Bay's Honorary Vice President is Camden composer
John Duffy. This summer's festival includes new partners
Colby College Museum of Art, Atlantic Music Festival and
New Era Gallery. Funding for the 2014 Seal Bay Festival
includes private contributors, Aaron Copland Fund for
Music, Alice M. Ditson Fund for Music, Amphion
Foundation, BMI Foundation, Gladys Krieble Delmas
Foundation, Wild Blueberry Café and Pittsburgh
Bacteriophage Institute.
Lauded as one of America's outstanding ensembles, the
Manhattan-Âbased Cassatt String Quartet is equally
adept at classical masterpieces and contemporary music.
This season they make their debut at the new Crystal
Bridges Museum of American Art and the College of Fine
Arts and Communication in Central Arkansas, New York
City's River to River Festival, Princeton University,
the Honolulu Chamber Music Series, the Big Sky Music
Festival in Montana (with cellist Hamilton Cheifetz),
New York's Tenri Cultural Institute with the Koshinan
Ensemble, the Pleasantville (N.Y.) Friends of Music, New
York's American Bolero Dance Company and Connecticut's
Treetops Chamber Music Society (with harpist Lisa
Tannebaum). They again collaborated with Ursula Oppens
in the premiere of Tania Leon's Piano Quintet and
together appeared at Bargemusic (N.Y.) and Music
Mountain (Conn.). Finally, they return to their eighth
annual Texas educational residency, Cassatt In The
Basin, which includes a Triple Quartet performed
side-Âby-Âside with students and the Cassatt.
Established in 1985, the Cassatt has collaborated with a
vast array of artists including members of the Cleveland
and Vermeer quartets, the Trisha Brown Dance Company and
Pulitzer-Âprize winning composers Steven Stucky and
John Harbison. The Cassatt holds residencies as New
York's Symphony Space "All-ÂStars"; and with the
HotSprings Music Festival and Maine's Seal Bay Festival
of Contemporary American Music.
Named three times by The New Yorker magazine's Best Of
The Year CD Selection, the Cassatt has recorded more
than 25 commercial releases for the Koch, Naxos, New
World, Point, Tzadik, Albany and CRI labels. The Cassatt
String Quartet is named for the celebrated American
impressionist painter Mary Cassatt and can be found on
YouTube. For more information, visit cassattquartet.com.
Courier Publications' A&E Editor Dagney C. Ernest
can be reached at (207) 594-Â4401, ext. 115; or
dernest@courierpublicationsllc.com.
Cassatt String Quartet featured
in 2014 Seal Bay Festival, Maine
The twelfth Seal Bay Festival of American Chamber Music
will be held from July 7th - 12th, 2014 with
performances in Vinalhaven (7/9), Belfast (7/10),
Waterville (7/11) and Ogunquit (7/12), Maine.
This summer's festival includes new partners, the Colby
College Museum of Art, the Atlantic Music Festival and
the New Era Gallery. The festival brings the superb
Cassatt String Quartet and living American composers
together in collaboration for a series of concerts on
the coast of Maine to include performances for school
children (Colby College Museum of Art and the Barn
Gallery in Ogunquit) and four masterclasses with student
performers and student composers (Bay Chamber Music
School in Rockport and the Atlantic Music Festival in
Waterville).
The Cassatt String Quartet returns to collaborate with
resident composers Bruce Adolphe, Director of Education
at Lincoln Center and host of NPR's "Piano Puzzler" and
Lawrence Dillon from the North Carolina School for the
Arts. The festival will also feature music by Seal Bay
Festival director, Daniel S. Godfrey as well as George
Gershwin. Each and every venue invites the public to
interact casually with composers and performers. The
Cassatts will be joined by Lauren Lessing, Colby College
Museum of Art's Merkin Curator of Education in
Vinalhaven and Belfast. This 2014 theme, "New Creative
Heights" connects music, visual arts and history, seen
through artistic struggle and triumph.
Funding for the 2014 Seal Bay Festival includes private
contributors, Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Alice M.
Ditson Fund for Music, Amphion Foundation, BMI
Foundation, Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, Wild
Blueberry Café, Pittsburgh Bacteriophage Institute.
Lauded as one of America's outstanding ensembles, the
Manhattan based Cassatt String Quartet is equally adept
at classical masterpieces and contemporary music. This
season they make their debut at the new Crystal Bridges
Museum of American Art and the College of Fine Arts and
Communication in Central Arkansas, New York City's River
to River Festival, Princeton University, the Honolulu
Chamber Music Series, the Big Sky Music Festival (MT)
with cellist, Hamilton Cheifetz, New York's Tenri
Cultural Institute with the Koshinan Ensemble, the
Pleasantville Friends of Music (NY) the American Bolero
Dance Company (NY) and Treetops Chamber Music Society
(CT) with harpist, Lisa Tannebaum. They again
collaborated with Ursula Oppens in the premiere of Tania
Leon's Piano Quintet and together appeared at Bargemusic
(NY) and Music Mountain (CT). Finally they return to
their eighth annual Texas educational residency, Cassatt
In The Basin! which includes a Triple Quartet performed
side-by-side with students and the Cassatt.
Established in 1985, the Cassatt has collaborated with a
vast array of artists including members of the Cleveland
and Vermeer Quartets, the Trisha Brown Dance Company,
and Pulitzer-prize winning composers, Steven Stucky and
John Harbison. The Cassatt holds residencies as New
York's Symphony Space "All-Stars" and with the
HotSprings Music Festival and Maine's Seal Bay Festival
of Contemporary American Music.
Named three times by The New Yorker magazine's Best Of
The Year CD Selection, the Cassatt has recorded over
twenty-five commercial releases for the Koch, Naxos, New
World, Point, Tzadik, Albany and CRI Labels. The Cassatt
String Quartet is named for the celebrated American
impressionist painter Mary Cassatt and can be found on
YouTube. For more information access:
www.cassattquartet.com
Portland Press Herald
June 19, 2011
Review: Cassatt String Quartet worthy of acclaim
By CHRISTOPHER HYDE
The concert would have graced Lincoln Center; for it to
take place at the Dunaway Center in Ogunquit Friday
night was little short of phenomenal.
The world-renowned Cassatt String Quartet, with pianist
Adrienne Kim, played four major contemporary works,
including a world premiere. And each one was introduced
by the composer.
The compositions varied tremendously in style, but each
was given a thoughtful, lively and technically flawless
performance. No composer could have asked for more.
The first work on the program was #Cadmium Yellow# by
Laura Kaminsky, a string quartet in one movement that
attempts to depict, primarily through timbre, the
various emotional effects that can be realized by that
color. The range of sounds the composer could wring from
four stringed instruments was incredible.
#Chrome Yellow# was followed by the world premiere of
#Cartas de Frida,# a piano quintet by Samuel Zyman, a
Mexican composer who teaches at Juilliard. My favorite
work of the evening, it is based upon three letters by
Frida Kahlo to her off-again-on-again husband, Diego
Rivera.
Each movement faithfully follows the emotional contours
of the letter, from loving resignation through the most
violent of passion and stages in between. Zyman's style
is dramatic but basically tonal and melodic, using Latin
idioms. I was groping for analogies when a friend
suggested Korngold (the noted film music composer) meets
Ravel. He was close, but Zyman has a quality all his
own.
After intermission came #Lift High, Reckon; Fly Low,
Come Close,# a piano trio by Anna Weesner. As the
composer pointed out, the verb-adverb title is long, but
the music, more dissonant than Zyman's, describes such
encounters, perhaps intellectual versus sensual, quite
accurately, with a wide range of effects, including some
beautiful dripping water sounds that reminded me of
Alban Berg.
More concrete imagery, but also emotionally accurate,
was in the five-movement quartet #Quijotadas,# by
Gabriela Lena Frank, which depicts scenes from the
career of Don Quixote, ending with his awakening from
illusion after a beating by donkey drivers.
Frank also employs Latin American rhythms and forms, but
transformed by a thoroughly modern - and definitely
non-nostalgic - sensibility.
Christopher Hyde's Classical Beat column appears in
the Maine Sunday Telegram. He can be reached at
classbeat@netscape.net.
Maine Sunday Telegram
June 5, 2011
Classical Beat: It's never too early to introduce
kids to classical music
By CHRISTOPHER HYDE
If you read the Sunday paper early, it might be a good
idea to pack the kids into the car and drive to
Ogunquit's Dunaway Center in time for today's free 12:30
p.m. concert by the world-renowned Cassatt String
Quartet. If no kids are available, the program, like all
good music for children, will appeal to adults as well.
The quartet, on its way to the Salt Bay Chamberfest in
Vinalhaven, will present a one-hour program with guest
artist pianist Adrienne Kim titled "A World of Pure
Imagination."
It will begin with "Nature in Music," which includes
bird calls and music inspired by the New England
countryside.
The second segment, "Imagination in Music," describes
how ideas generate feelings that can be translated into
drawings and music. Noted composer Laura Kaminsky will
talk about the way painting and music can relate to one
another, with examples from her string quartet "Cadmium
Yellow" (2010).
The final episode is called "Dance Partners," showing
how instruments fit together: "Do you have to stay with
the same partner the whole time? Can you be by yourself?
How do we stay together without stepping on each other's
toes?"
To me, this is one of the best ways to get children
interested in classical music: by involving their
curiosity and enabling them to connect it to their own
experience, without dumbing it down. Children can detect
condescension a mile away.
They also love to be involved. The most popular spot in
our house is the music room, where they can blow on
recorders or slide whistles, beat the drum, try to get a
sound out of a didgeridoo or bang on the piano. If it
doesn't break strings to play Bartok, a child can't do
too much damage, although my piano tuner disagrees.
Bartok is always a hit, although children will stand
still for Debussy too, if it's a live performance and
not too long. Bartok's loud tone clusters and
dissonances make them jump for joy and shout, "Let me
try it!" Mozart's five-octave stretch (use your nose) is
also popular, like instantly learning "Joy to the
World," a descending C-major scale.
The point is that children cannot be mere listeners
unless there is something exciting going on, like a
march to the gallows or Papageno playing the magic
flute. Come to think of it, opera, in small doses, might
also be a good introduction to the classics. But
probably not - too much soupy love stuff.
The best predictor of musical enjoyment at a young age
is musical parents, especially those who play an
instrument. Exposure is all. Children tend to imitate
the grown-ups they're around and to consider what they
are brought up with the natural order of things.
It doesn't take much. My mother's only piano piece was
one she had learned as a child: "Where the Shy Little
Violets Grow," with a ragtime beat. We all loved it and
would pester her to play it every time she got near a
piano. It was my ambition to play anything that well.
Later, when I got a little better, she wanted me to play
"Stardust," the "St. Louis Blues" and a Tchaikovsky
Romance, when I wanted to play "Malaguena" like a kid I
had heard on the radio. (I don't think he was very good,
but it sounded miraculous to me.) My sister and I
auditioned for a radio talent show because we knew all
the songs in "Oklahoma!" forward and backward and could
imitate all the voices. The judges thought the material
was inappropriate for preteens. Then I was a boy
soprano, an Irish tenor and finally a piano player.
It doesn't matter how "serious" the music is, as long as
it is a constant presence and paid real attention to,
something that seems impossible nowadays with the
multitude of easy and inconsequential choices available
to every kid with an iPod. When music is "background,"
it isn't music. The real danger is that it will be
diluted out of existence.
I have been thinking for a long time about introducing
children to the classics, especially because readers
often lament the prevalence of white hair in the
audience. Well, even rappers will eventually have white
hair.
Classical music will always be there, and there will
always be a select audience for it, even if it's only in
the palace of an oligarch.
Christopher Hyde is a writer and musician who lives
in Pownal. He can be reached at:classbeat@netscape.net
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