by Kevin McLaughlin
A sold-out crowd gathered June 26 in the “King Cobra” room at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland for “Continental Rifts,” the next-to-last program of ChamberFest Cleveland’s 2026 season.
As artistic director Diana Cohen noted from the stage, wars in Iran and Syria were central to the evening’s design. Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” string quartet cast its shadow forward to George Crumb’s Vietnam-era Black Angels.
The evening began with the Andante from Schubert’s Quartet — a movement borrowed from the composer’s own death-haunted song. Michelle Barzel Ross and Geneva Lewis, violins, Emad Zolfaghari, viola, and Jay Campbell, cello, operated on an extraordinary scale of subtlety. We entered a miniature, almost fairy world, where pianissimos felt loud, inaudibility marked the far horizon, and feeling still registered in a thousand hues.
Barzel Ross drew astonishing color from minute bow changes. Lewis matched her closely in articulation and shade. Campbell supplied warmth when the music called for it, while Zolfaghari sustained a quiet tension in the inner voice. The players struck the movement’s delicate bargain: fate ever present, hope flickering, yielding at last to something like peace.
Arshia Samsaminia’s 2017 In Eternity, written for viola and piano during the composer’s exile from Iran, is music of longing and distance. Zolfaghari’s viola playing was willowy and delicately expressive, while pianist Mishka Rushdie Momen shaped the narrative with supple give-and-take. Her reaching inside the instrument to strum the strings felt so graceful that one wondered why the effect isn’t used more often.
Kareem Roustom’s Syrian Folk Songs for string quartet offered a different kind of longing, rooted in memory and tradition. Violinist Steven Copes, violist Teng Li, and cellist Oliver Herbert joined Ross, to bring earthy warmth to Roustom’s reimagined melodies. Li sounded fully at home in the idiom, giving each phrase the weight and grain of authentic folksong.
With the first movement from Gabriel Fauré’s Piano Trio in D minor, the program’s line of thought shifted. Momen, Copes, and Campbell played the opening Allegro with elegant restraint, choosing clarity over show. Fauré’s elusive melodic lines came into focus here: Momen provided the movement with a firm outline, Copes’ violin sang with gentle light, and Campbell’s cello line wove the voices together. The performance let Fauré’s clear, balanced, and understated late style make its quiet case.
Hooshyar Khayam’s “Maah” (Moon), from his Royâ cycle, was one of the evening’s treasures. Ross and Momen let its chant-like patterns and shimmering harmonics linger — a pause for breath in a night full of movement.
The night ended with George Crumb’s Black Angels: Thirteen images from the Dark Land, completed in 1970 and inscribed by the composer “in time of war,” — a piece that still chills the air decades after Vietnam. Lewis, Ross, Zolfaghari, and Campbell acted it as much as performed it, navigating a maze of amplified strings, water-tuned crystal glasses, shouted numbers, whispered syllables, and sudden ritualized outbursts. Managing Crumb’s large-format scores, three from iPads, was a feat in itself.
At its center was the sixth image, “Pavana Lachrymae,” over which Schubert’s melody hovers in disembodied form. With “Death and the Maiden” still fresh in the ear and the “Dies irae” chant slipping in and out, the program’s title came into focus: these were not only rifts between continents, but between eras, memories, and ways of hearing. The audience sat in rapt silence before a work that still makes it impossible to hold war at a safe distance.
Published on ClevelandClassical.com July 2, 2026
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