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.

Read the rest of this entry »