by Peter Feher

Like any good introduction, opening night at ChamberFest Cleveland this year left you wanting more. The sold-out concert on June 12 at the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Mixon Hall was a chance to savor a little of what the 2024 festival has to offer.

The theme behind this year’s programming, “Sacred and Profane,” was front and center for the first concert. So was the overriding idea that guides ChamberFest every season: bringing together great musicians and great music. Wonderfully, these aims aligned on Wednesday in an arresting performance of Claude Debussy’s Danse sacrée et danse profane featuring harpist Bridget Kibbey. It was the shortest work of the evening, but also the standout.

In exploring the fundamental dichotomy between heaven and earth, eternity and reality, the spirit and the body, Debussy was simply trying to demonstrate everything that a modern harp could do. He had been commissioned by a French manufacturer to write a showpiece for the company’s new instrument, yet the resulting work wasn’t strictly contemporary when it premiered in Paris in 1904.

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Bridget Kibbey did on Saturday what harpists rarely get to do: she stole the show. No mean feat when sharing the stage with the other bright and esteemed performers who regularly appear as part of ChamberFest Cleveland — particularly during “Fantastic Tales,” the third concert of this year’s season, which took place on June 15 at the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Mixon Hall.

Kibbey was also lively with the microphone, giving an engaging introduction to André Caplet’s 1924 Conte Fantastique (Fantastic Tale). After the performance, she mingled among the crowd — not so much a star gesture as a genuine one that made her performance even more memorable.

Given that André Caplet orchestrated and conducted some of Debussy’s works, many associate the two composers. To say Caplet’s musical language is impressionist-adjacent is partly true but hardly encapsulates his unique, ahead-of-his-time voice.

Kibbey made the most of Caplet’s action-packed work — part harp concerto and part tone poem, based on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Masque of the Red Death.

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