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Contact: Gabriel Langfur
info@chameleonarts.org
617-427-8200
Chameleon Arts Ensemble Announces 2009-2010 chamber music season
August 3, 2009 – Boston, MA – The Chameleon Arts Ensemble is pleased to announce its 12th season of chamber music concerts in Boston. All of the performances take place at the Goethe-Institut Boston, 170 Beacon Street in the Back Bay, one of the most beautiful and intimate music rooms in the city. The series opens on Saturday and Sunday October 3rd and 4th, and continues with concerts on Saturday November 7th, Saturday and Sunday February 6th and 7th, Saturday March 27th, and Saturday and Sunday May 22nd and 23rd. Saturday concerts begin at 8 PM and Sunday concerts at 3 PM.
Since its founding in 1998, Chameleon and artistic director Deborah Boldin have earned unqualified praise for integrating old and new repertoire into unexpected chamber music programs that are themselves works of art. They were recognized nationally with 2009 and 2007 ASCAP/CMA Awards for Adventurous Programming. The Boston Globe praised Ms. Boldin’s “carefully curated blending of classic and contemporary repertoire,” and her “discerning ears and cosmopolitan tastes,” and remarked, “during intermission, concertgoers could be heard marveling at the program’s breadth and wondering why other groups aren’t as adventurous. Chameleon makes daring seem easy.”
This innovative ensemble now draws capacity audiences of those who love the adventure of music—classic and contemporary. A Chameleon concert is a multifaceted experience in an intimate environment joining audience and musicians in an exuberant celebration of music. The musicians are among Boston’s most highly-respected and sought-after performers, with growing
national and international reputations. Their superb artistry and finely honed collaborative skills ensure luminous performances and dynamic musical dialogues. The 2009-2010 season will again offer Chameleon’s inimitable mix of the witty and the sublime, the adventurous and the beloved, with favorites by Brahms, Mozart, Messiaen, Schubert, and Tchaikovsky, as well as marvelous yet less familiar works by Toru Takemitsu, August Klughardt, Pierre Boulez, Leon Kirchner, Pierre Jalbert, and others.
The season opens with music and all silence held, on Saturday, October 3 at 8 PM and Sunday October 4 at 3 PM. The program centers on the world of Olivier Messiaen with his masterpiece Quatuor pour la fin du temps for clarinet, violin, cello & piano. Also on the concert are Mozart’s Duo for violin & viola in G Major, K. 423, and Claude Debussy’s Sonata for cello & piano, two composers whom Messiaen deeply admired. The great Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu considered Messiaen to be his spiritual mentor and principal influence. His And then I knew 'twas wind for flute, viola & harp, also on the program, takes its title from a poem by Emily Dickinson, and owes a debt of gratitude to Debussy for his invented ensemble. “Both Takemitsu’s and Messiaen’s music,” Boldin describes, “are full of ravishing sounds of seemingly endless timbral variety, blurring the line where the music stops and silence begins.”
wordless, wondrous things, on Saturday, November 7, 2009, 8 PM, is a Chameleon-style evening of song—no words necessary. The program is inspired by Felix Mendelssohn’s Lieder ohne Worte, Op. 109 for cello & piano. Music, of course, began with song, a mode of story-telling more complete and richly textured than speech alone. Even the smallest wisp of melody, in the words of Mendelssohn, “fills the soul with a thousand things better than words.” The concert also includes August Klughardt’s Schilflieder Reed Songs for oboe, viola & piano, Op. 28; Estonian composer Ester Mägi’s Serenade for flute, violin & viola; Sebastian Currier’s Whispers for flute, cello, piano & percussion, and the Piano Trio No.1 in B-flat Major, Op. 99, D. 898 by perhaps the greatest song composer of all, Franz Schubert.
The second half of the season begins on Saturday, February 6, 2010 at 8 PM and Sunday, February 7 at 3 PM with for that transforming touch. The art of borrowing existing music and transforming it into something new is a practice as old as music itself. Both Brahms and Boulez made a habit of revisiting their works, often creating new masterpieces the second time around, and variations on opera themes have long been the foundation of the virtuoso repertoire.
The concert includes Pablo de Sarasate’s Concert Fantasies on Carmen for violin & piano, Op.25; Pierre Boulez’s Dérive I for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, vibraphone & piano; Irving Fine’s Partita for wind quintet; and Brahms’ beloved Piano Quintet in f minor, Op. 34 which existed in two forms before the enduring work we know today. American composer Libby Larsen gives us a clever yet heartbreaking addition to the repertoire in Try Me, Good King for soprano & piano. Throughout the cycle, based on the final letters and gallows speeches of Henry VIII’s wives, she weaves lute songs by Dowland, Praetorius, and Thomas Campion. She writes “these songs were composed during the reign of Elizabeth I, and while they are cast as some of the finest examples of the golden age, they also create a tapestry of unsung words which comment on the real situation of each doomed queen.”
Very rarely, an artist emerges who transforms an art form forever. A revolutionary thinker and iconoclast for sure, Arnold Schoenberg nevertheless considered himself a successor in the tradition of Beethoven and Brahms. Of melody yet unknownon Saturday, March 27, 8 PM, explores paths to and from this pivotal figure, ending with his student Leon Kirchner, perhaps the greatest living representative of his musical aesthetic. The program will include Beethoven’s Quintet in E-flat Major for piano & winds, Op. 16; Brahms’ Sonata No. 2 in E-flat Major for viola & piano, Op. 120; songs of the Second Viennese School for soprano and piano; and Kirchner’s Piano Trio II. Schoenberg’s Kammersymphonie No. 1, Op. 9 (1906) arranged by his student Anton Webern for flute, clarinet, violin, cello & piano, creates an “axis” for the concert. It is a vividly expressionist, seminal work that pushes traditional tonality to the very brink and marks the turning point in his compositional style and the beginnings of his move toward the 12-tone technique.
The season comes to a close with flung on canvas like notes divine, on Saturday, May 22, 8 PM and Sunday, May 23, 3 PM. Composers find inspiration in the world all around them, painting portraits in sound of people, places and things that they love. New Zealander Gareth Farr’s Taheke for flute and harp evokes three breathtaking waterfalls of his homeland, Pierre Jalbert’s Visual Abstract for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and percussionis inspired by bells and church domes and the sounds associated with them, and Fauré’s La Chanson d'Ève for soprano and piano is an art nouveau meditation on the feminine ideal. Finally, Tchaikovsky gave us a musical celebration of his “city of dreams” in the joyously exuberant Souvenir de Florence for string sextet, Op. 70.
The May concerts will also serve as a benefit for ReadBoston. Audience members who bring new or gently used books will receive 25% off ticket prices. Founded in 1995, ReadBoston works to promote a love of reading and literature at every age. Each year, they distribute thousands of free books to community centers, childcare providers, and after school programs throughout Boston’s many neighborhoods.
For tickets or more information, concertgoers can call 617-427-8200 or visit www.chameleonarts.org. Subscription prices range from $49 to $152, and individual tickets are $38, $28 and $18. $5 discounts for students and seniors are available for individual tickets. Goethe-Institut is a wheelchair accessible venue.
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