Copious Notes

The Escher String Quartet are violinists Adam Barnett-Hart and Aaron Boyd, cellist
Dane Johansen, and violist Pierre LaPointe. © Photo by Laura Rose.

Violinist Benjamin Beilman, guitarist Jason Vieaux, and the Escher String Quartet will bring a youthful vibe to the seventh annual Chamber Music Festival of the Bluegrass, Memorial Day Weekend at the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill. Rounding out the lineup are pianist Wu Han and cellist David Finckel, who have served as the event’s artistic directors since its inception in 2007.

Guitarist Justin Vieaux. © Photo by Tyler Boye.

In that short period, the festival has seen a number of changes, including the departure of one of the original co-presenters, Centre College’s Norton Center for the Arts, and a change in leadership at the Shaker Village. But the appeal of hearing musicians from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center perform in the pastoral beauty of the Shaker Village and the directors’ affection for the venue have sustained it.

“It’s the community; it’s the setting,” Wu said last year, in an interview with the Herald-Leader. “Management will come and go, from our experience, but art, if you have a community to support it, if you have the audience and, in the case of the Shaker Village, that particular setting, it’s irreplaceable.”

While the Escher will play several times together in the four concerts over two days, there will also be several chances for the group to mix with other musicians on pieces such as Johannes Brahms’ Sextet No. 2 in G major for Two Violins, Two Violas, and Two Cellos, which will close out the festival in the May 26 concert at the Meadow View Barn.

The event will open late on the morning of May 25 with Wu and Finckel, one of classical music’s celebrated couples, teaming up for Claude Debussy’s Sonata for Cello and Piano. 

Violinist Benjamin Beilman. © Photo by M. Cabeza.

That concert will also give Beilman a solo turn performing Eugène Ysaÿe’s Sonata in E Minor for Violin and the Escher will play Benjamin Britten’s Three Divertimentos for String Quartet. The next morning, Vieaux will have the stage to himself with Isaac Albeniz’s “Sevilla” and “Asturias” from Suite española for Guitar. And then there will be plenty of mixing and matching over the four performances. The festival really is a chance to watch world-class musicians play, in several senses of the word.

Beilman’s star is rising quickly in the 2010s with appearances around the world, particularly in chamber settings, and an Avery Fisher career grant to his credit.

Vieaux has recordings of works by J.S. Bach and Astor Piazolla to his credit, serves as the head of the Guitar Department at the Cleveland Institute of Music, and he is a co-founder of The Curtis Institute of Music’s Classical Guitar Department.

The Escher String Quartet does take its name from the Dutch artist M.C. Escher, famous for works such as interweaving stair cases, and has racked up a distinguished list of venues and achievements over its eight years together, including being invited to perform at Itzhak Perlman’s summer festival. Its recorded catalog includes works by Alexander von Zemlinsky and Amy Beach.

Click here for the complete program and artist biographies.

Click here for ticket information.

Cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han are artistic directors of the Chamber Music Festival of the Bluegrass. They are shown performing in the Meadow View Barn May 30, 2010 at the Shaker Village, Pleasant Hill. © Photo by Kirk Schlea.

SHAKERTOWN — To the audience, some of the faces change each year, but the Chamber Music Festival of the Bluegrass at Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill has remained a fairly consistent event since its debut in May 2007.

In its second year, it moved to Memorial Day weekend and added a late-morning pair of concerts in the village’s acoustically sterling Meeting House. Behind the scenes, though, there has been a lot of change.

The festival was the brainchild of George Foreman, then-director of Centre College’s Norton Center for the Arts. He departed for the University of Georgia at the end of 2009, and last year, the Norton Center bowed out of the event, saying it wanted to focus on programs for the ­campus and ­students. But ­leaders at ­Shakertown thought they had a good thing and took over sole ­presentation of the festival last year, under the leadership of ­longtime Shakertown director Madge B. Adams. She retired last summer, succeeded by Maynard Crossland, who came from the ­Illinois Historic Preservation Agency.

It’s a lot of change for a young festival, but through it all, ­Chamber Music Society of Lincoln ­Center ­directors Wu Han and David ­Finckel have remained as the ­festival’s artistic directors, and despite all the change, Han says they never ­considered letting the event go.

“It’s very simple,” Wu said from her home in New York. “It’s the community; it’s the setting. ­Management will come and go, from our experience, but art, if you have a ­community to support it, if you have the audience and, in the case of the Shaker Village, that ­particular setting, it’s irreplaceable.

“It’s so magical, particularly in the modern world we live in today, to have a place for the renewal of spirit. I just could not find a better setting.”

Wu, a pianist, and Finckel, a cellist, usually perform at the festival but couldn’t attend last year. They will be back for this year’s event.

Maynard Crossland is in his first year as the new director of the Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill. He is shown in the village's meeting house where two concerts in the Chamber Music Festival of the Bluegrass will take place May 26 and 27, 2012. © Herald-Leader staff photo by Rich Copley|.

Crossland ­envisions the ­festival as part of an ­overall strategy to get a larger, ­younger audience into the village and experience it as ­relevant to modern life as much as a historic destination.

“We really need to look at our customer base and ask what it is that they’re ­wanting,” he says. “What they’re wanting is a whole lot different than what their parents were wanting. So we need to be able to meet that need. It’s a lot more activity.

“Telling the story of what happened here has to be more than standing in front of an interpreter and having them tell you a story. It has to be immersive in all the senses, and people have to be able to take away things they can use in their own lives.”

Crossland wants to realign the conception of ­Shakers from that of “a weird religious sect” to that of a culture that developed and perfected practices such as business and sustainability that are seen as virtues today.

Music, of course, also was part of that culture.

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Patrons filled the Meadow View Barn for the May 30, 2010 performance of the Chamber Music Festival of the Bluegrass. Photos by Kirk Schlea.

The Chamber Music Festival of the Bluegrass, which has become an annual Memorial Day weekend event at the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, is back on for 2011.

David Finckel and Wu Han in performance at the 2010 festival.

In previous seasons, the festival had been announced as part of the season at Centre College’s Norton Center for the Arts. But this season, the center has bowed out of participation in the event which will be presented exclusively by Shaker Village. As in the past, the festival will feature musicians from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and be directed by the society’s David Finckel and Wu Han.

This year’s festival will feature four concerts: 11 a.m. performances in the Meeting House May 28 and 29 and 5 p.m. concerts in the Meadow View Barn those afternoons. There will also be pre-concert lectures by composer Patrick Castillo at 3 p.m. each day.

The musicians this year will be the Orion String Quartet, which was featured at the 2008 festival, and violin and violist Ida Kavafian, clarinetist Jose Franch-Ballester and pianist Inon Barnatan, who was a soloist with the Lexington Philharmonic in November.

Admission to the festival ranges from individual concert tickets to festival, accommodation and meal packages. Visit shakervillageky.org or call 1-800-734-5611, Ext. 1545 for more information and reservations.

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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Audiences packed the Meadow View Barn at the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill for last years Chamber Music Festival of the Bluegrass. Photos by Rich Copley | LexGo.

• Check out our audio slide show from As It Is In Heaven.

Shaker Village of ­Pleasant Hill doesn’t necessarily need music.

The lush, green grounds of the community are a sustained pianissimo passage, frequently augmented by the songs of birds, whistling of the wind and rhythm of rippling water.

Leave your iPod behind.

But that does not mean that music cannot enhance the Pleasant Hill experience.

As Rachel in "As It Is in Heaven," Erica Solitaire Chappell sings in Pleasant Hill’s Meadow View Barn.

The Shakers, after all, are known for their songs – Simple Gifts, anyone? The University of Kentucky Theatre has been bringing some of those tunes to the stage of the Meadow View Barn the past two weekends with its ­production of Arlene Hutton’s As It Is In Heaven.

That production, which has its final performances today through Sunday afternoon, begins and ends with the women of the play ­strolling through the field adjacent to the barn raising songs to the tops of the trees.

The music does not stop there, though.

Next weekend brings the third annual Chamber Music Festival of the Bluegrass, and if you are trying to come up with a more perfect ­marriage of music and venue in ­Kentucky, you have some work to do.

We tend to think of ­classical music as something to seal in a perfectly quiet concert hall, supposing that one obscured note would obliterate an entire work. Of course, perfect silence is rarely achievable in a hall full of people, with walls that aren’t impervious to honking horns and sirens.

Yes, Meadow View Barn is susceptible to the sounds of its environment, but a violin mixes so much better with a bird or a breeze than a candy wrapper or screeching tires.

At last year's Chamber Music Festival of the Bluegrass, the lineup included the Orion String Quartet, featuring sibling violinists Todd and Daniel Phillips.

In the natural setting, at last year’s festival, the music seemed to open, with the instruments so close to their source materials.

And these are musicians to make the most of the environs.

All three years of the ­festival, the Norton Center for the Arts at Danville’s ­Centre College has engaged the Chamber Music ­Society of Lincoln Center to ­oversee its artistic direction. ­Pianist Wu Han has been the constant, and this year she brings ­violinist Erin Keefe, cellist Fred Sherry and ­clarinetist David Shifrin. If you pay attention to classical music, each is an ­internationally known practitioner of his or her instrument.

For the second year, the festival has engaged a second group, this time the Escher String Quartet, to play in its own right and mix with the Lincoln Center musicians in the festival’s four concerts.

Those combinations, like Robert Schumann’s Quintet in E Flat Major for Piano, Two Violins, Viola and Cello, scheduled for next Sunday night, are the real treats of the event.

The morning sessions, in the village’s ­Meetinghouse, focus on Ludwig van Beethoven on Saturday and J.S. Bach on Sunday. The evenings include music of Beethoven, Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy.

Debussy and nature? — makes sense.
As does trying to take the arts out to environments such as Pleasant Hill.

So often we try to hype the natural beauty of the ­Bluegrass, but then when it comes to presenting the beauty of the arts, we retreat to the city like everywhere else.

The Heaven performances, chamber music festival and other outdoor events show an arts community trying to get more in tune with our ­surroundings.