Gabriel Weber
Staff Writer
The artists of ChamberFest Cleveland intend to wield their instruments as paintbrushes for a “sonic coloring,” according to pianist Amy Yang.
With a “bright” and “visceral” program, ChamberFest Cleveland — with violinists Diana Cohen and Geneva Lewis, violist Kim Kashkashian, cellist Jonathan Swensen, and pianists Roman Rabinovich and Yang — takes the stage at 4 p.m. today in Elizabeth S. Lenna Hall for its seventh performance at Chautauqua Institution.
Founded by Cohen and her father Franklin, ChamberFest Cleveland is unique in its makeup and accomplishment of its mission — to nurture a deep family-like connection between musicians and audiences of all ages. ChamberFest Cleveland is the only world-class chamber music festival in the Cleveland community.
A piece of fostering this “beautiful musical conversation,” Cohen said, is their Rising Stars program. While these young artists are “fully formed,” she said, the experience provides shared wisdom from the older musicians as the Rising Stars reciprocate with “wonderful energy.”
“Many of these rising stars end up as our most beloved colleagues over the years,” Cohen said. “We hope to expose them to the best music making and we love to show them what our community in Cleveland can be.”
The group planned a “beautiful pairing,” Cohen said, of John Adams’ “Hallelujah Junction” and Johannes Brahms’ Piano Quintet in F Minor, Op. 34. Spanning across two different centuries, these two pieces provide a contrast to each other.
A century before Adams’ piece, Brahms remodeled his sonata continuously for two years with input from artistic confidants like Clara Schumann, Joseph Joachim and Hermann Levi. Brahms originally conceived the piece as a string quartet but then reworked it into a sonata for two pianos. Ultimately, Brahms ended up compromising between the two versions for a richer finalization in 1865.
“The Brahms piece has great mechanics — it’s emotional, visceral, tender, and really everything you want,” Cohen said.
Named after a truck stop on Route 49 on the Nevada-California border, the 16-minute long “Hallelujah Junction” was composed in 1996 for a special concert at the Getty Museum. As every program this year has featured a piece by a living composer, Pulitzer Prize-winning Adams is going strong at 78 years old. Written for two pianos, Yang and Rabinovich, “wonderful friends” who share an undergrad experience at Curtis Institute of Music, will take on this “extremely challenging piece of chamber work,” Yang said.
“We basically are interlocking within each other’s patterns for the whole piece — we complete each other’s rhythms,” Yang said. “There’s a sense of perpetual motion. In the build up, he creates extraordinary expanses of vitality and this sonic coloring that is just very particular to his language.”
To Yang, performing with the “best colleagues” is “just an ecstatic celebration of musical friendship.”
“At its best, chamber music is what we all strive for in life, which is close connection — we get that through music,” Cohen said. “When it’s done really, really well, that same sense of connection is shared with the audience, and that’s our hope because the more of that connection we can make as humans, the better the society that we live in.”
