by Mike Telin
If you were to ask just about any musician why they enjoy playing chamber music, they will tell you that it’s because they get to make music with people they enjoy. Case in point, the Butler Trio — Sandy Yamamoto (violin), Joshua Gindele (cello), and Colette Valentine (piano).
“We are all on faculty at the University of Texas, but the Trio formed when I left the Miró Quartet back in 2011,” Yamamoto said by telephone from Austin. “Josh [the cellist in the Miró] and I weren’t quite ready to be done with making music together, so we talked about playing in a piano trio. At the time Colette had joined the faculty so we asked her if she would play some trios with us.”
On Monday, February 6 at 7:30 pm at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church, the Rocky River Chamber Music Society will play host to the Butler Trio. The program will include Rachmaninoff’s Trio Élégiaque No. 1, Beethoven’s Piano Trio in D (“Ghost”), and Schumann’s Piano Quartet in E-flat with guest violist Lembi Veskimets. The concert is free. Click here to access the live stream.
The Rocky River Chamber Music Society opened its 64th season on Monday, September 26 at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church with a performance that symbolized part of what the organization is all about.
When the Oberlin Conservatory’s Richard Hawkins was asked to curate a concert for the Rocky River Chamber Music Society, he knew right away that it was an opportunity to program works that would include his Oberlin Conservatory faculty friends. “It’s always nice to present chamber music for winds and strings that people might not know,” the clarinetist said during a telephone conversation.
Russian pianist Arsentiy Kharitonov played the second concert in the Rocky River Chamber Music Society Series on Monday evening, November 15, not in the Society’s home venue — West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church — but at Lakewood Congregational Church, due to COVID-19 concerns. I watched the recital, a hybrid event with in-person attendance permitted, via the live stream.
One challenge of concert previews is balancing a discussion of the music against a portrait of the artist. In the case of pianist Arsentiy Kharitonov, who will visit the Rocky River Chamber Music Society for a free concert on Monday, November 15 at 7:30 pm at Lakewood Congregational Church (masks required), those two worlds of content collided. The way he described his program — works by Bach, Schubert, Schumann, Johann Strauss, Scriabin, and Rachmaninoff — was very telling about the way he thinks about music.
The Rocky River Chamber Music Society’s live-streamed 62nd season came to a rousing conclusion on Monday, May 17, when five wind players and a pianist came together around quintets by masters of old and new.
Lately, wind players have only been sighted here and there on the calendar, and have mostly performed all on their lonesome. That makes the finale to the Rocky River Chamber Music Society’s 62nd season an extra special occasion for anyone with a fondness for music of the lungs.
Live music brings risk, and when it comes to live-streamed concerts, that risk extends to technology. A recital on February 15 from the Rocky River Chamber Music Society hit a few snags in that area early on, but that didn’t steal the spotlight from the dazzling performances we heard from Steven Banks and Xak Bjerken in a compelling program of music for saxophone and piano.
Four string players and a clarinetist, all from The Cleveland Orchestra, came together on December 7 for a quartet and a quintet in “Nothing But Mozart,” streamed live from West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church as part of the 62nd season of the Rocky River Chamber Music Society.