Copious Notes

Click play to hear a podcast of our conversation with Wu Han and David Finkel.

[podcast]http://copiousnotes.bloginky.com/files/2010/05/100520cmfobg-hanfinkel.mp3[/podcast]

Copious Notes podcasts are available on iTunes.

The unplayed tune that has colored the Chamber Music Festival of the Bluegrass is a Rodgers and Hammerstein classic: Getting to Know You.

Wu Han and David Finkel. Photo by Christian Steiner.

For the fourth consecutive Memorial Day weekend, the festival will bring together members of the Chamber Music Society of ­Lincoln Center and Central Kentucky ­classical music fans at Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill.
“I could feel there’s a sense of trust that’s been building up on the reputation and the quality of the music,” says pianist Wu Han, who co-directs the festival with her husband, cellist David Finkel.

She points out that in the festival’s first years, she and Finkel brought along other brand-name ­classical stars such as violinist Joseph Silverstein and the Orion String Quartet. This year, like last year, leans more on new faces. Last year’s fresh entry was the Escher String Quartet. This year, it’s some hot young ­soloists, including violinist/violist Yura Lee and ­cellist Jakor Koranyi.

That duo will play Maurice Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello, which earned them flat-out raves when they played it in New York last month. In his review for the New York Daily News, Howard Kissel acknowledged it was not a piece he was familiar with, but he was completely taken with Lee and Koranyi’s performance.

Offering performances like that put the festival, presented by Centre College’s Norton Center for the Arts, on a trajectory it should be on, Wu Han says.

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The League of American Orchestras is taking a 21st-century approach to developing the agenda for the opening town hall of its June conference in Atlanta.

The town hall will look at “how orchestras can be an increasingly vital part of 21st-century culture.” Folks interested in the topic are invited to visit orchestrarevolution.org to suggest topics and questions and vote on ones that have already been suggested for the session, which will be attended by more than 1,000 American orchestra leaders.

People who are interested in the town hall can also participate online at the site, as it will be streamed live 3:45 to 6 p.m. June 16 at the site. Online participants can interact using Twitter and the hashtag “#orch2010.”

The Downtown Arts Center is continuing to grow as a film venue and presenter with three new pictures on the schedule this year.

June 7 or 13: Appalshop and the DAC will show parts of several projects and present a discussion on how to shape a film once it is shot. The exact time and date for this event have not been determined.

Sept. 25: Lexington-based filmmaker Tom Thurman’s 2008 documentary Nick Nolte: No Exit will be shown for the first time in Lexington. The film, which was shown in the Cannes Market concurrent with the Cannes Film Festival, is part of Thurman’s catalog of documentaries on movie figures, including films about directors John Ford and Sam Peckinpah and actor Warren Oates. He met Nolte while working on his 2006 documentary about Hunter S. Thompson on film, Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride. Thurman is a producer for KET, and his films for the network include Basketball in Kentucky: Great Balls of Fire.

Dec. 4: The DAC will partner with the Kentucky Theatre for a showing of the 1934 silent classic A Story of Floating Weeds, with a score performed live by guitarist Alex De Grassi, at the Kentucky. De Grassi was commissioned by the New York Guitar Festival to write a score to the film, considered a breakthrough work for director Yasujiro Ozu. DAC programming director Leslie Beatty says this is part of a series the center is developing called “Out of the Box,” events produced by the venue but presented outside of it.