The Chesapeake Chamber Music Festival Returns to Easton in June

By James Carder

Chesapeake Music’s 41st annual Chamber Music Festival returns to Easton, Maryland for two weeks beginning June 12th. In the intimate elegance of The Ebenezer Theater, 17 world-class musicians will perform six concerts, ranging from the very best works of the standard repertoire to exciting contemporary pieces. As David Faleris, Executive Director of Chesapeake Music, has remarked, “Chamber music is above all a musical conversation among friends,” and, indeed, many of the Festival musicians have performed together in Easton for decades and are beloved by the community. But, as always, there will be new faces as well, and those interested can meet them all by attending not only the six concerts, but also the free open rehearsals.

This year’s Festival is titled “Musical Memories” and is curated by Artistic Directors Marcy Rosen and Catherine Cho. They have programmed many of chamber music’s best-loved pieces, compositions that are frequently cited as among the greatest works in the chamber music canon. There will be three works each by Franz Schubert and Johannes Brahms, including Schubert’s famous “Trout” piano quintet and Brahms’s equally famous “Horn” trio. Also on the bill are two beautiful works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, including his famous horn quintet; Antonin Dvořák’s ever-popular second piano quintet; Beethoven’s late masterpiece Cello Sonata No. 5; and the extraordinarily beautiful string sextet “Souvenir de Florence” by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The incredible sonority of six stringed instruments playing together in an intimate hall will occur a second time with a Brahms string sextet, a work that closes the first week’s concerts.

Modern 20th-century music at the Festival includes Ralph Vaughan Williams’s powerful 1903 Piano Quintet in C Minor, which like Schubert’s “Trout” quintet includes an unexpected double bass. Flutist Tara Helen O’Connor will give a tour-de-force performance of Heitor Villa-Lobos’s 1950 Assobio a Játo (“The Jet Whistle”), with cellist Julia Yang providing the essential “mellow cello” second voice. And soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon will lend her warm, beautifully focused voice to Dmitri Shostakovich’s extremely poignant song cycle Seven Romances on Poems of Alexander Blok, a haunting, late-period masterpiece composed in 1967.

Two important contemporary works are also certain to be stand-out performances at this year’s Festival. Soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon and Tara Helen O’Connor (playing three instruments!) will tackle the highly virtuosic score of Kate Soper’s 2011 Only the Words Themselves Mean What They Say. In this bravura duet, the voice at times becomes an instrument and the instruments become vocal, ultimately leaving both the performers and the audience breathless. And American-Iranian composer Kian Ravaei’s 2023 song cycle Gulistan (“Flower Garden”) will be performed by Lucy Fitz Gibbon, Lydia Brown and Julia Yang. The cycle interweaves traditional Azerbaijani and Persian songs with Western folk songs to create a multi-layered lament on unrequited or abandoned love.

And the Festival will again showcase the Lerman Gold Prize winners of this year’s Chesapeake International Chamber Music Competition for Young Professionals. Having won the competition and taken home their $10,000 prize money, the winners will return to the Festival to perform works of their choosing at the June 19th concert.

Be a part of this year’s Chesapeake Chamber Music Festival and experience this extraordinary music in an intimate setting. Detailed information on the Festival concerts, including programs, dates, times and ticket availability, can be found at ChesapeakeMusic.org.