CHOICE 2020, DIGITAL EDITION
/Every year we end our season with a concert curated by our audience. Concertgoer’s cast votes after each concert and we smash up the winners in one fun end-of-season event. This year, we are unable to bring you Choice in person, so we are producing a digital version with messages from musicians, pics and links to recordings, including some of our commissioning project!
SEPTEMBER : ll : WINDOW
560 Music Center
WINDOW / SEPTEMBER / The 560 Music Center
We opened our season with a world premiere by St. Louis composer David Werfelmann. On Vitreous Forms was a huge hit with our audience and was to be featured on our Audience Choice concert this week. You loved it!
Flautist Jennifer Gartley says, "David wrote a showstopper of a piece. We worked on it really hard and our audience loved it. It's such a pleasure to perform new music and have it so well received!"
Also on the program was music by Kristin Kuster, Joseph Haydn and Aram Khachaturian. Photographer Jason Hackett captured some images during a rehearsal with composer David Werfelmann.
Musicians: Kyle Lombard, Eli Lara, Jennfer Gartley, Dana Hotle, Matthew Mazzoni. Not pictured: Kelly Karamanov, Jeffery Barudin
OCTOBER : ll : RESILIENT
projects+gallery
In October we presented RESILIENT at projects+gallery to a sold out audience. Music by fan favoriteFlorence B. Price and St. Louis composer Cindy McTee began this moving program. Cindy McTee was in attendance and spoke with our audience about her process for composing a memorial tribute for 911. Listen to Leonard Slatkin conduct the orchestral version here.
Felix Mendelssohn's String Quintet Op. 87 followed. Violinist Kyle Andre Lombard is passionate about this piece. He says, "I love the 3rd movement!!! All I’d have to say is that it is one of the most personal and moving pieces I know of, and if you’re not religious at all, this one will take you TO CHURCH! It’s an avalanche of emotions, and I had to stay calm to be able to execute and not get swept up."
If you were at this sold out concert, you know he lead the quintet to a beautiful and moving performance of this masterpiece. This most certainly would've made it onto our Audience Choice concert this week, if only because Kyle would've insisted on it! Give it a listen, you’ll understand why Kyle is so enamored by it. Listen here.
Musicians: Jane Price, Kyle Lombard, Laura Reycraft, Valentina Takova. Not pictured: Amy Greenhalgh
Virginia Harold Photography 10/11/202o
BRAHMS SEXTET: Recorded live in Alice Tully Hall on February 21, 2017. Video produced by Ibis Productions. Artists: Paul Huang, Sean Lee, violin; Paul Neubauer, Matthew Lip...
NOVEMBER : ll : BEAUTY
Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
At our November concert we presented 3 pieces: Two Pop Songs on Antique Poems by Dinuk Wijeratne; Beauty Beneath, our second commission and world premiere of the season by Syrhea Conaway; and one of the juggernauts of classical music the String Sextet in Bb major by Johannes Brahms.
Our audience and musicians alike loved this entire program. Beauty Beneath by Syrhea Conaway received a mountain of enthusiastic votes and was slated to be performed on Audience Choice, but all of the works were very popular and we likely would've performed a bit of all three pieces from this concert.
For the first time, the recording of Beauty Beneath is available for you to listen to!
L-R. Executive Director Dana Hotle and composer Syrhea Conaway discussed music on KWMU. Listen here>
Our musicians were passionate about this entire program, and they all wanted to do it again immediately.
Valentina says:
“Of course the Brahms Sextet is a monumental and beautiful piece that we were all lucky to be able to perform, but a really fun thrill for me were the Wijeratne’s Pop Songs! We rarely get to be pop stars and play in an improvisatory style, and it is very exciting when we find a piece of music that gives us those opportunities. Chamber Project is especially good at finding those real gems in classic chamber music form!”
Laura says:
“The Brahms B-flat Major Sextet was a piece I had been longing to perform for two decades. It is one that everyone reads in late night chamber music reading parties. I had read it many times but didn’t get to dive in and rehearse until last fall. My favorite movement is definitely the second movement which is Theme and Variations. The first viola introduces the theme and trades off with the first violin. From there the variations become more animated, even stormy, with the growling scales in the cellos and 2nd viola before coming to a noble conclusion. I love how the cello plays the melody in a low register at the end and the pairs of violins and violas weave in their laments. The movement feels so complete and satisfying when you reach the last chord.”
Listen here to the Israeli Chamber Project perform the second movement.
FEBRUARY : ll : RECESS
The Schlafly Tap Room
A rare concert of music for winds presented our third world premiere of the season, I don't wanna dance... by L.J. White along with music by Jean Françaix and American composer Valerie Coleman.
Clarinetist Dana Hotle says, "We've performed quite a bit of Valerie's music over the years, but never one of her woodwind quintets. She was a founding member of one of the best woodwind quintets in the world so she knows how to write for them, and Tzigane did not disappoint. It was one of the most fun pieces I've performed and I was looking forward to doing it again on CHOICE. We will have to bring it back in the future as our audience loved it as much as I did!"
Listen to Imani Winds perform Tzigane by Valerie Coleman:
MARCH :ll: TENACITY
World Chess Hall of Fame
Perhaps the last live concert that happened in St. Louis before events shut down the next day, the theme of this concert has proved to be timely.
Featuring the music of composers who overcame obstacles of war, prejudice and isolation we performed the rarely hear music of Hungarian composer Lazlo Lajtha.
Harpist Megan Stout says, "Working on the Lajtha Quintet was so rewarding! While the piece is very tricky, he had an unusually great handle on what sounds and ideas work well on the instrument and how they could be executed. Also, he shared the main melodies with the harp and sometimes they were simple, light, and fast ...not leaving me with only rich chords, arpeggios, and glissandos while others play the melody, which often happens for the harp."
You can hear what Megan is talking about about 40 seconds into the fourth movement, which begins with an eerie mood which dissolves almost magically into a beautiful sweeping melody.