Excerpted from the Boston Globe
"discerning ears and cosmopolitan tastes"
"planning a good chamber music program is an art unto
itself, and few in town have mastered it as persuasively as
the Chameleon Arts Ensemble."
"Founded in 1998, the Chameleon Arts Ensemble may not
as yet have achieved the status of a trusted brand name among
concert-goers, but just you wait. Their concert Saturday night,
we will attest, was typical of them. That's to say that a
certain charged, eager, "something in the air" quality
permeated everything they did..."
"The muses were evidently smiling...The music wore a
human face, did not over-insist, and gripped the attention..."
"Mary Ann McCormick, formerly of Boston, now of the
Met, brought back with her a mezzo sound of firmness, size,
and outright sheer quality for Ravel's "Chansons madecasses"
(1926), the French text projected every bit as sumptuously
as the notes themselves, with hedonistic, sensous consequences
that bordered on the dangerous."
"If this was luxury class, so in its way was the Shostakovich
Violin Sonata Op. 134 (1968). Kurkowicz and Chien gave us
its elaborate, beautifully worked cosmic gloom intact, uncompromised,
and altogether convincing."
"Music by the Night-Wind Sent, another evening of smart,
zealous music-making by the young ambitious Chameleon Arts
Ensemble, took its auditors on an amazing journey…."
"first-class new ensemble" – Best Classical
Music 1998, The Boston Globe
"Chameleon is not just another chamber group"
"Believe it or not, there's been this muttering lately
about there being too much chamber music in this city. And
now what should appear on the scene but another new outfit
— its members eager and young, to be sure, but with nothing
whatever to blush about as to technique, musical smarts, or
knowing what goes with what on a program. In this concert
the Chameleon Arts Ensemble of Boston didn't make a single
wrong move."
"…At times it was the damnedest thing you ever
heard. Some notes came up at you from the floor; and here
you were seated 80 feet away from the performers. It all made
for civilized, if rather off-the-wall discourse, especially
in this crackerjack account…."
"Chameleon’s all-female and all-in-tune all-the-time
wind quintet turned Beach’s piece into a sonorous confection."
"Sergei Prokofiev’s tough, ironic Quintet, Op.
39 cleansed the palate, as the players showed the swarming
timbral possiblities a composer can mine from just five instruments."
"John Harbison’s lovely "Twilight Music"
has an end-of–the-affair ruefulness to its horn and violin
conversations, marvelously played"
"Evenings," five songs from the poems of Anna Akhmatova
by the gifted 20-year old composer Christopher Trapani, received
a strong Boston premiere….the truth and naturalness of
her [Sabrina Learman] voice made a powerful effect, as did
the eerie music-of-the-spheres strings harmonics that closed
the cycle."
"For Shostakovich’s trio, [they] summoned the courage
and calm needed to abandon themselves…. lamenting harmonics
seemed wrung not from steel strings but a single stretched
nerve fiber that sang the sadness of the world….these
matchless young artists found a human voice and wisdom far
beyond their years."
"The young, hot, and hungry young musicians of the chameleon
Arts Ensemble, many of them only recently fledged from conservatory,
are gearing up to take the town by storm."
"They opened with Joan Tower's lovely 1989 Island Prelude….Lush,
serene wind chords create an opalescent soundscape over which
the oboe, gorgeously played by Nancy Dimock, soars and swoops
in increasingly active volutes and trills."
"[They] rounded off the evening with Clara Wieck Schumann's
delicious piano trio, in a freewheeling performance; tearing
headlong through the stormy passages and loitering shamelessly
in the fragrant ones."
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