Portland Chamber Music Festival News
annual chamber music festival in Portland, Maine
Commemorations 2024 (Inauguration: Portland Chamber Music Festival)
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- United States of America
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2024-03-29
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The Boston Musical Intelligencer
2016-08-25 17:23:05
Electric Eclecticism in Maine
Jeremy Flower (file photo) The Portland Chamber Music Festival wrapped up for this year on Saturday with its usual pleasantly eclectic blend of old and new, and in this case with one intriguingly non-standard ensemble supplementing the conventional groupings. Mozart’s Piano Quartet No. 2 in E-flat Major, K. 493 opened. The history of his two piano quartets, among the first of their kind (possible predecessors are quartets by Johann Schobert, F.X. Dušek and Emanuel Förster), is fraught with commercial frustration. It turns out the public wasn’t enthusiastic for keyboard chamber music for ensembles bigger than a trio, especially employing the more advanced techniques Mozart used—he was mostly busy on piano concertos at the time. Although a few composers tried it out in the two decades after Mozart’s second quartet was published in 1785, it really wasn’t until Schumann (who of course also invented the piano quintet) that this format took […]
The Boston Musical Intelligencer
2016-08-23 04:21:44
Portlandiana Rewards Again
César Franck The third of the four concerts of the Portland Chamber Music Festival got going Thursday with No. 12 of the op. 1 set of trio sonatas by Vivaldi for two violins and continuo. This particular one is formally distinct, as it is really a set of variations on that most protean of musical sources, the 15th century Spanish or Portuguese tune “La Folía,” which by one account has been set, varied or otherwise used in at least 521 compositions, by composers (other than the prolific “anonymous”) ranging from Lully through Rachmaninoff and down to another composer on this evening’s program. It is probably no longer necessary (as it would have been a generation ago) to point out that Vivaldi was no mere note-spinner, the fellow who wrote one concerto 500 times, but a composer of infinite variety, wit and depth, who fully justified the high regard in which […]
The Boston Musical Intelligencer
2016-08-17 04:00:14
Slavic Poles of the Chamber Sort
Jennifer Elowich, director (file photo) Saturday’s concert of the Portland Chamber Music Festival called itself “The Russian Soul,” which bemused us, inasmuch as one can hardly imagine more disparate personalities in mainstream Russian music than Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky. Still, there’s something to be said for the pairing (and the Borromeo Quartet has been doing it for some years now). Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet in G Minor, Op 57 began the somewhat abbreviated program. While it is not strictly true that the composer wrote no chamber music before his string quartet series began, in 1938—there are the early Piano Trio No. 1 and the exquisite Cello Sonata—his output began in earnest in the 1950s, as a means of expressing private thoughts that might have exacerbated his political troubles, bad enough already, in his more public symphonic works. That said, the Quintet, from 1940, was conceived in part as a showpiece for the […]
The Boston Musical Intelligencer
2016-08-15 02:29:04
Yes Portland Has No Programmatics
It came this time with no programmatic theme, the works rather being arrayed by size of ensemble, with a clarinet trio, piano quartet and string quintet. Thus did the 23rd season of the Portland Chamber Music Festival get underway Friday at Hannaford Hall at the University of Southern Maine’s Abromson Center. Beethoven’s familiar and popular op. 11 Trio in B-flat got things started with a work that has forever confounded those seeking to number the composer’s piano trios. Though written originally for clarinet, cello and piano, Beethoven also transcribed it (not entirely satisfactorily, in the opinion of many violinists) for conventional piano trio. So which is it? Beethoven’s only clarinet trio or the Piano Trio No. 4? Exactly. In 1798, when Beethoven had not yet fully given himself over to the earnest reshaping of musical form and substance, he imbued this three-movement entertainment with geniality, charm, and occasionally naughty abrupt harmonic […]
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