Rocco Prioletti
Staff Writer
At 8 p.m. today in the Amphitheater, ChamberFest Cleveland will debut the season’s first performance for Chautauqua Chamber Music’s Guest Artist Series. This marks the group’s return to Chautauqua for their ninth consecutive year.
Established in 2012, ChamberFest Cleveland arose from founding co-artistic directors and father-daughter pair Franklin and Diana Cohen. The festival serves as the region’s one-of-a-kind celebration of chamber music.
“The close-knit community that chamber music provides was really the best thing in life. I loved being a part of it, and I wanted that for my hometown of Cleveland,” Diana Cohen said. “We started out small, inviting just a close cadre of musicians that we really knew and loved. Since then, it’s grown immensely over the years.”
Their three-week-long program invites the festival’s familial roots onto the stage, branching an intimate relationship between world-class musicians and an all-inclusive audience.
“That kind of camaraderie fostered here is so evident onstage,” Diana Cohen said. “The audience really feels that, and it makes them feel invited into the action.”
Diana Cohen was surrounded by music throughout her upbringing. Her parents, both touring chamber musicians, allowed her to experience the gift of music from all across the world. However, the most impactful moments came right from the living room.
“Most of my formative memories include hearing my parents rehearse chamber music with their friends or with traveling string quartets,” Diana Cohen said. “It was just so powerful to be in the first row, in that sense, to really see how these people came to life around other colleagues, and friends making music and connecting in that way.”
Despite their expanding personnel, the “family-like connection” nurtured from the group’s initial rehearsals and shared meals together at Franklin Cohen’s home never subsided. Instead, ChamberFest shares this sincere relationship with audiences; every performer’s unique humanity, spirit and character remains equally important.
“I love being able to bring that kind of colorful, eclectic group of people with so much to say to Chautauqua,” Diana Cohen said. “We are hosted by wonderful members of the community that we love spending time with. We feel very lucky to be part of Chautauqua’s offerings year after year. It’s very special.”
The performance will open with Ernő Dohnányi’s “Seranade.” The eccentric string trio work was written in the same year as Mahler’s Symphony No. 6 and Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly.” As a prolific, forward-thinking figure in 20th-century classical music, the Hungarian composer’s influence and interests travelled farther than his birthplace.
“It does have some Hungarian flavor in it — especially the second movement,” Diana Cohen said. “He wasn’t writing music that just sounded like the Hungarian voice; he was writing music that had cosmopolitan influence.”
ChamberFest pays similar attention in curating disparate voices, resulting in its eclectic program — spotlighting compositions from juxtaposing backgrounds, time periods and styles.
“In Eternity” follows as a contemporary composition for viola and piano by Iranian composer Arshia Samsaminia. It was written during a period where Samsaminia was unable to return home to Tehran.
Diana Cohen explained that Samsaminia sees the piece as a means of remaining attached to something distant. Rather than portraying the spatial absence itself, it reflects one’s interior through unfolding, instinctual sound.
Emad Zolfaghari, a Canadian violist who will be performing “In Eternity,” similarly dedicates his performance to his father, who immigrated from Iran at the age of 21. Diana Cohen relayed that Zolfaghari is reminded of his father’s advice to never forget his roots, thanking him for his ability to perform and pursue music at the same age he’d immigrated at.
The evening will conclude with a performance of Franz Schubert’s “Trout Quartet.”
“It’s just ebulliently joyful — full of life and luminescence,” Diana Cohen said. “It’s one of those feel-good pieces that leaves everyone humming it on the way home.”
