Author name: Jim Wilson

– by CMSCVA Artistic Director James Wilson It’s summer time, and for a classical musician that usually means festival time, a point in the year where I put aside my usual projects and groups, and play with a more diverse group of colleagues in far-flung places. If you’re lucky like I am, this means going to some very interesting locations and experiencing completely different types of music-making. Over the next couple weeks, I would like to report from some of these festivals as a sort of first-person view of chamber music offerings. Just having returned from playing in the Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival, one of the world’s biggest and most diverse classical festivals, I wanted to write a short blog piece about it. It’s really extraordinary, and in a couple postings from last year, I outlined what makes it so amazing and characterful. You can read these pieces here: http://beautyoffew.blogspot.fi/2013_07_01_archive.html Being in Kuhmo made me think a lot about the theme of “large verses small.” The obvious starting point is physical – it is a huge music festival held in a small rural town, and there is a lot of energy and friction that results from this contrast. Musically, Kuhmo thrives on large and small, not only as a concept but as numbers. The Artistic Director, Vladimir Mendelssohn, is a genius at putting together unexpected programs that capitalize on the quantity and quality of musicians he has at hand. For instance, one concert consisting almost solely of piano pieces by Liszt, Debussy and Granados, ended with a chamber orchestral piece of 20+ people playing Respighi’s “Trittico Bottechelliano.” All of this contrast is entertaining and definitely keeps the ears wide open for experiencing sound. But it also made me think about the emotional impact of music and how that also can…

Notes on the “The French Connection.”                      – by Carsten Schmidt The first half of the seventeenth century saw the evolution of a particularly French way of composing music for solo harpsichord.  It was by no means the first time the harpsichord was elevated to solo status, nor was it the only place where this was happening.  But French composers placed an unusual emphasis on the sensuous and unique sound properties that this plucked keyboard instrument is capable of producing.  The impetus for this may very well have come from the close ties of those early harpsichordists to their lutenist colleagues.  Not only did they initially share some of the same repertoire- a fair number of lute pieces are transmitted in harpsichord transcriptions- but it is quite likely that the earliest French harpsichordists were in fact also lute players themselves.  This was quite different from most of the other countries where solo harpsichord repertoires emerged – in the Low Countries and Italy, for instance, there was a much closer connection with the world of the organ. At the core of this new musical creation is an adaptation of lute techniques, which became known on as style brise or luthe, a breaking of chords in gentle and often extraordinarily creative and expressive ways. Today’s program traces some of the French contributions to the harpsichord repertoire over almost a century, with works by three members of the Couperin family, D’Anglebert, and DuPhly.  Alongside you will hear works by three German composers, Froberger, Muffat, and J.S. Bach, music that would be inconceivable without the innovations of their French colleagues. The profound influence that this French repertoire had is not limited to the Baroque era.  Chopin, Schumann, and Rachmaninoff most certainly didn’t know a single note of Louis Couperin or D’Angleber, yet their own keyboard…

– By James Wilson, CMSCVA Artistic Director The “Quartet for the End of Time” is one of the most famous chamber music compositions of all time, and the musical work that inspired tonight’s program. In their own way, each piece on the program seems to reach out beyond our own world and into the infinite, whether through religious fervor, technical mastery, or both. A devote Catholic, ornithologist, musical genius and brilliant keyboard players, Olivier Messiaen weaved all of these passions into this unusual piece. The circumstances under which it was written are legendary. Messiaen was 31 years old when he enlisted in the French army to fight the Germans in World War II. In 1940, he was captured and sent to a prisoner-of-was camp in Görlitz, Germany. Using paper and a pencil stub, Messiaen produced the piece slowly over the course of a year with help from fellow musicians also imprisoned in teh camp. It was premiered with terrible instruments, outdoors and in the cold rain of January in 1941 for a crowd of 400 inmates and officers. Messiaen wrote of the event, “Never was I listened to with such rapt attention and comprehension.” The “End of Time” takes two meaning in this piece. The more literal meaning is the depiction of the “end times” in the Book of Revelations: And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire … and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth …. And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, and sware by him that…