While viewing the program the background music will be J. J. Froberger’s Tombeau pour M. Blancrocher, played by Apollo’s Fire at last year’s Festival, and featured on our CD.
Jean-Paul Bierny, president of AFCM, interviews Peter Rejto, artistic director of the Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival since its inception. Peter is speaking from his home in Sydney, Australia. Peter and Jean-Paul discuss how the music and musicians for this year’s festival evolved over a two year process.
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9 minutes
The Festival features 5 concerts from March 4th – March 11th, 2012,
plus a Gala Dinner on Saturday, March 10th.
There are also free Open Dress Rehearsals: 9 a.m. – Noon
Wednesday, March 7th — Friday, March 9th — Sunday, March 11th
Apollo’s Fire Baroque Ensemble will again thrill Tucson audiences on Tuesday, March 6, 2012 – 7:30 p.m. at this year’s Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival.
“Mediterranean Nights: Sultry Songs & Passionate Dances
from 17th-century Italy & Spain,”
featuring music by Boccherini,
Ortiz, Merula, Uccellini and Castello.
Here they play Dario Castello’s Sonata No. 2 for Violin & Continuo, recorded at the 2011 Festival and featured on AFCM’s most recent CD.
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Castello (1590–1658) was a younger colleague of the great Claudio Monteverdi at
St. Mark’s in Venice. Although his publications are advertised as being “in stile
moderno,” he in fact blended styles by alternating passages in the older strictly
contrapuntal “canzona” style with contrasting sections in the newer freely expressive
style. His Sonata No. 2 develops with quick mood changes and culminates with a
powerful conclusion. With nothing but a bass line and melody indicated (no tempos,
dynamics, etc.), the piece can sound quite different with every performance.
AFCM CD’s are available at www.classicalcds.net/arizona/
Jean-Paul Bierny, president of AFCM, interviews cellist Jaime Laredo and violinist Sharon Robinson about their February 22th concert. As you will hear, the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio embarked on a consortium project with Ellen Taaffe Zwilich –– scored for quintet with Schubert’s “Trout” instrumentation and performed with violist Michael Tree and double-bassist Harold Robinson. You’ll hear both pieces at Wednesday’s concert. AFCM is proud to be a part of that consortium through our unique commissioning program.
We also support the Trio’s International Trio Award. Learn more about the KLRITA here.
Listen to the interview
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The concert will be at Leo Rich Theater on February 22th at 7:30 p.m.
Purchase tickets here
(The webmaster wishes to apologize for the audio quality. Jaime and Sharon were speaking from their hotel in Washington, and it seems that when trying to communicate with Washington some voices are heard louder than others, and there’s always some static on the line.)
The Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival is just a month away!
March 4th – March 11th
We would like to introduce a new feature.
Visit the blog a few days before our Evening series and our Piano & Friends matinee series. The link you see above in the navigation bar will provide complete program notes for the upcoming concert. If you miss the concert, the notes are still interesting reading. Complete program notes for the Festival will soon be available on the website in a nifty online viewer, before the Festival starts on March 4th .
If you prefer, sign up for the program notes email list. We keep that separate from the main list so we don’t send you mail you don’t want. We will mail the notes a few days before the concert.
Don’t even think about missing our February 5th concert.
Elena Urioste, violin, with Michael Brown, piano, will be performing sonatas by Mozart, Prokofiev, Ravel and Strauss for our Piano & Friends series at 3:00 p.m., Leo Rich Theater. More info about the concert at arizonachambermusic.org
Here the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia performs with music director Dirk Brossé and violinist Elena Urioste Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor at The Temple Performing Arts Center in the Lew Klein Hall at Temple University on February 15, 2011.
Lots more audio and video on Elena’s website . Enjoy!
Bob Foster
AFCM webmaster
The morning after the Jupiter String Quartet concert Jean-Paul Bierny (AFCM president) and I were hiking up Ventana Canyon, when we chanced to meet a very pleasant gentleman named Ira, a winter visitor from Boston, and struck up a conversation about the gorgeous weather and scenery. Ira then quite spontaneously mentioned the fabulous concert he had been to the night before. He didn’t recognize Jean-Paul, who had spoken before the concert. A smiling Jean-Paul listened as he described the concert, talked about how he thought the Schubert was the most beautiful piece of music ever written, shared very interesting comments about the Bartok, and admitted the he had never heard of the website (sigh). He was, however, most interested in learning about our commissioning program, and that each premiere can be heard in its entirety on arizonachambermusic.org.
Turned out that this was his third January visit and that he had read about us in the Tucson Weekly. Good to know that music in Tucson lives up to truly world-class standards, not to mention such low ticket prices compared with back East.
Bob Foster,
AFCM Webmaster
Welcome to AFCM’s newest feature, where we will provide the latest news.