 |
|
|
|
Sunday, September 16, 2007 If you go By Vivian DeGain The beauty of chamber music shines in the variety, virtuosity and individuality of performance. The venues are choice. The audiences are small. The selections are as unique as the artists performing them. As the Chamber Music Society of Detroit opens its 64th season of concerts by award-winning ensembles of strings, winds and piano – one performance will honor a centenarian, an American composer dubbed “a musical journalist.” The Julliard String Quartet violinist Joel Smirnoff, who also serves as the ensemble’s leader, describes the composer this way. “Elliot Carter is nearly 100 years old and in the world of international music, his is unique. He has an entirely different view. He is a musical journalist. He tries to describe in sounds, what he sees and hears in the society or world all around him. He is political. He captured the ambivalence or the Zeitgeist of the 60s in this music (that will be performed) which is rich with dissonance, conflict and tensions in very clear musical terms,” Smirnoff said. Smirnoff, a native of New York City and a member of the Julliard quartet since 1986, is also the chair of the Violin Department at the JuilliardSchool. “In Carter’s 2nd Quartet, the four instruments are like four different characters. The musical notation calls for the four musicians to sit far enough apart from each other that the audience can hear each separately,” he said. “Everyone gets a soliloquy. The second violin is the compulsive time keeper, detail oriented. The violist is sorrowful. The cellist plays impulsive, individualist cello. And the first violin is the wildest, most ranging personality, flamboyant. It is a very difficult piece. We haven’t played this piece for 13 years. It is a favorite,” Smirnoff said. Any performance is based on a decision made long in advance, because it’s all about the necessary rehearsal time, he said. “The way it works in our business, we must decide our programs a couple of years in advance,” Smirnoff said about selections, even favorite selections. Each group will chose a few programs to master each year and then the artistic directors of the selected venues across the nation and around the world will select a program they wish to feature from the short list. Lois Beznos, president of the Chamber Music Society of Detroit, said the Julliard returns this year as one of nine in the chamber music series and the three piano recital series. “Our entire season features internationally renowned artists, special events and preconcert talks. Award-winners include Augustin Hadelich, the Gold Medalist from the Indianapolis International Violin Competition; and Ingrid Fliter, winner of the 2006 Gilmore Artist Award. The Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio with Kirsten Johnson, viola will feature a program with commissioned works by Richard Danielpour, the composer of recent opera Margaret Garner.” There will also be music from China with the Shanghai String Quartet. “There is a special feeling here,” Beznos said. “There is a warmth for both the audience and the performers on stage. There is nothing more intimate than chamber music. There are 724 seats in the hall at the Seligman Performing Arts Center and anywhere you sit the acoustics are excellent.” The Juilliard String Quartet will perform the Carter: Quartet No. 2 with a full program that also includes Haydn, Quartet in E-flat major, Op. 76, No. 6 and Verdi, Quartet in E minor. Smirnoff said the selections were chosen because of the influence they each had on each other – and Carter. This is Verdi’s sole piece written for chamber music, a contrapuntal study written in the dessert, in sunny, southern Italy. The Julliard String Quartet, a four-time Grammy Award winner, returns to one of their favorite venues. Smirnoff said, “We are very enamored of the Chamber Music Society of Detroit. Here we have great audiences, including several pieces that have been commissioned for us. The society is doing everything possible to assure this great music remains alive, through performance, composition, and in the preparation of young people for the future.” For more information www.juilliardstringquartet.org. Contact writer Vivian DeGain at degainvi@comcast.net. |
||
