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Contact: Gabriel Langfur
info@chameleonarts.org
617-427-8200
Chameleon Arts Ensemble Announces 2008-2009 Chamber Music
Season
August 1, 2008 - Boston, MA - The Chameleon Arts Ensemble
begins its second decade of chamber music concerts in Boston
with the 2008-2009 season. All of the performances take place
at the Goethe-Institut Boston, 170 Beacon Street in the Back
Bay, one of the most beautiful and intimate music rooms in
the city. The series opens on Saturday and Sunday October
4th and 5th, and continues with concerts on Saturday November
8th, Saturday and Sunday February 14th and 15th, Saturday
March 28th, and Saturday and Sunday May 16th and 17th. Saturday
concerts begin at 8 PM and Sunday concerts at 3 PM.
In a city immersed in music, the Chameleon Arts Ensemble
is distinguished by superb artistry, luminous performances,
and dynamic musical dialogues. This innovative ensemble draws
capacity audiences of those who love the adventure of music-classic
and contemporary. A Chameleon concert is a multifaceted experience
in an intimate environment joining audience and musicians
in an exuberant celebration of music. The musicians are award-winning
local artists with growing national and international reputations,
who have appeared with orchestras and in recitals around the
world. Since its founding in 1998, Chameleon and artistic
director Deborah Boldin have earned unqualified praise for
integrating old and new repertoire into unexpected chamber
music programs that are themselves works of art, and were
recognized nationally with a 2007 ASCAP/CMA award for adventurous
programming. The Boston Globe praised her "discerning
ears and cosmopolitan tastes" and remarked that "planning
a good chamber music program is an art unto itself, and few
in town have mastered it as persuasively as the Chameleon
Arts Ensemble."
The 2008-2009 season will again offer Chameleon's
inimitable mix of the witty and the sublime, the adventurous
and the beloved, with favorites by Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms
and Debussy, marvelous yet less familiar pieces by Manuel
de Falla, Hanns Eisler, Aaron Jay Kernis and others, and the
world premiere of a new work by Cambridge resident Shirish
Korde. Jeremy Eichler of the Boston Globe noted: "Most
importantly, the group seems to have earned the trust of its
audience, so that even if a listener hasn't heard of every
work, he or she will still turn out and give it a chance…It
was unusual to see a mainstream audience turn out with such
open-eared enthusiasm for a program with so much unknown music."
Chameleon's keen, engaged audience has grown to capacity over
the years, and they are proud to respond by announcing the
addition of 3 Sunday afternoon performances for the
08-09 season, in October, February and May.
The season opens with transcendent music I have heard,
on Saturday, October 4 at 8 PM and Sunday October 5 at 3 PM.
Three blockbusters from three centuries make up the program,
works that define genres and set new benchmarks for what can
be expressed through music. Brahms' B Major Piano Trio stands
at the center of the Romantic repertoire for piano and strings,
and Claude Debussy singlehandedly invented an ensemble with
his Sonata for flute, viola & harp, a combination that
has been borrowed by countless composers since. And the august
Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki has given us the first
undeniable masterpiece of the 21st century with his Sextet
for clarinet, horn, string trio and piano, composed in 2000.
a hundred onward years, on Saturday, November 8, 2008,
8 PM, is a Chameleon-style exploration of music history fifty
years at a time, beginning joyfully with Beethoven's Serenade
in D Major for flute, violin & viola, Op. 25 from 1801
and winding up in the 21st century with Aaron Jay Kernis'
Trio in Red for clarinet, cello & piano of 2001. In between
are Robert Schumann's d minor Violin Sonata, Op. 121 (1851),
Charles Martin Loeffler's Deux Rhapsodies for oboe, viola
& piano (1901), and Lou Harrison's Songs from the Forest
for flute, violin, vibraphone & piano (1951). Aaron Jay
Kernis is one of America's most decorated composers. Only
48 years old now, he had a premiere by the New York Philharmonic
when he was only 23, and went on to be the youngest composer
ever to receive a Pulitzer Prize-awarded for his String Quartet
No. 2 ("musica instrumentalis") in 1998. He won
the prestigious Grawemeyer Award in Music Composition in 2002
for his work Colored Field, making him the youngest composer
to win that prize as well.
The second half of the season begins on Saturday, February
14, 2009 at 8 PM and Sunday, February 15 at 3 PM with a
tale that's told in ancient song. Composers have long
filled concert halls with the sounds of their native lands,
and this jubilant program draws from the richest folk traditions.
The concert includes Ravel's Tzigane, Rapsodie de Concert
for violin & piano, Manuel de Falla's Siete Canciones
Populares Españolas for soprano & piano, Chen Yi's
Qi for flute, cello, percussion & piano and Bedrich Smetana's
Piano Trio in g minor, Op. 15. British composer Judith Weir
has made a fanciful addition to the repertoire with Airs from
Another Planet: Traditional Music from Outer Space for wind
quintet & piano, a musical imagining of interplanetary
settlers, many generations removed from their Scottish heritage!
Three traditional Scottish folksongs are as she describes:
"quoted, but as if refracted through space time, far
distances and strange atmospheric effects."
like woven sounds of streams on Saturday, March 28,
8 PM, is a program dedicated to music inspired by water, nature's
greatest force of regeneration and renewal. Schubert's beloved
Trout Quintet is featured, as well as two works inspired by
the great Viennese composer: Dan Welcher's Mill Songs: Four
Metamorphoses after Schubert for oboe & bassoon, and Dominick
Argento's To Be Sung Upon the Water for soprano, bass clarinet
& piano. Notably, Chameleon will present a rarely heard
but seminal work by the brilliant German exile Hanns Eisler,
his Fourteen Ways to Describe Rain for flute, clarinet, string
trio & piano. Eisler's story is beyond tragic; he was
a wounded veteran of the First World War forced into exile
to the United States by Hitler's Third Reich, and then was
deported as one the first victims of the Hollywood blacklist,
ending up living out his life in East Germany. Fourteen Ways
to Describe Rain was composed in 1941 to accompany Dutch filmmaker
Joris Ivens' experimental film Regen. It was dedicated to
his teacher Arnold Schoenberg and premiered at his 70th birthday
celebration.
The season comes to a close with of spirits voices ecstatic,
on Saturday, May 16, 8 PM and Sunday, May 17, 3 PM, with music
that transports us to a mystical realm, a rapturous place
of inner spirituality and otherworldly fantasy. The program
includes Robert Schumann's Fantasiestücke for cello &
piano, Toru Takemitsu's Rain Spell for flute, clarinet, piano,
vibraphone & harp, Estonian composer Arvo Pärt's
Spiegel im Spiegel for clarinet & piano, and the Fauré
g minor Piano quartet, Op. 45, as well as the world premiere
of a new work by Shirish Korde. Zikhr for soprano, flute,
string trio, harp, tabla & percussion is based on texts
drawn from 13th century ecstatic poetry of the Sufi, including
Rumi, Rabia Kabir, and Faiz alongside the Christian Mystic
St. Cecilia of Siena. Mr. Korde will present Word on Music
about Zikhr thirty minutes before each performance.
Canadian soprano Zorana Sadiq returns to Boston as soloist
for Zikhr in her second collaboration with composer Shirish
Korde. She was praised for her "glowing sound" by
the Boston Globe in her premiere performance of Korder's Songs
of Ecstasy with Boston Musica Viva last spring. A remarkably
communicative and dynamic artist, she has performed extensively
throughout Canada and the US including recent solo appearances
with the Toronto Philharmonia and Chorale Society and the
Peterborough Symphony, and opera roles in Osvaldo Golijov's
Ainadamar with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Puccini's Gianni
Schicchi with Opera York, and Susanna in the Banff Festival's
production of Le Nozze di Figaro.
The May concerts will also serve as a benefit for ReadBoston.
Audience members who bring new or gently used books will receive
25% off ticket prices. Founded in 1995, ReadBoston works to
promote a love of reading and literature at every age. Each
year, they distribute thousands of free books to community
centers, childcare providers, and after school programs throughout
Boston's many neighborhoods.
For tickets or more information, concertgoers can
call 617-427-8200 or visit www.chameleonarts.org. Subscription
prices range from $49 to $152, and individual tickets are
$38, $28 and $18. $5 discounts for students and seniors are
available for individual tickets. Goethe-Institut is a wheelchair
accessible venue.
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info@chameleonarts.org
