Copious Notes

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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