After 32 years, the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival, long a beloved staple of South Florida summers, will come to an end this month.
Battered by the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated loss of funds, as well as tiring of the grind of putting together four weekends of concerts, the founders of the festival — flutist Karen Fuller, clarinetist Michael Forte and bassoonist Michael Ellert — will say farewell over the weekend of July 19-21, with three final concerts featuring the group’s usual mix of unusual and canonical repertoire.
At a recent lunch in Boynton Beach, the three musicians looked back on their legacy since their first concert in July 1992 at the Duncan Theatre on the campus of what is now Palm Beach State College in Lake Worth Beach. From then until the COVID-19 summer of 2020, the festival’s musicians played 12 concerts over four weekends in July — one program each at venues in the northern, central and southern parts of the county.
In addition to their recorded legacy of six albums on the Klavier label, the festival featured the work of 154 different musicians, and presented 425 different pieces, several of them world premieres.
“We wanted to create something for Palm Beach County, for the local musicians and for our community, and I feel like we did do that,” Fuller said.
But the COVID pandemic forced the musicians to perform on video in 2020, and in the following three summers, programs were cut back to one weekend. Although fundraising efforts were partly successful, the three have decided to bow out this summer, having presented one of the longest-running local arts events of its kind that was entirely self-made and not part of a larger performing or educational organization.
From the beginning, the festival has been distinguished by two factors above all: Because it was founded by woodwind and not string players, the repertoire it presented was far different than would be encountered on most chamber music programs. Second, it prided itself on its camaraderie, with many of the performers regularly appearing on festival programs for decades.
“We wanted to pay homage to the musicians who have been playing with us over the years,” Ellert said. “Some of them have been playing with us for more than 20 years.”
And the relationships they formed with each other were long-lasting, having been forged a month of intense rehearsals and performances each summer.
“There were musicians that, if they came up and treated it like just another gig, they didn’t stick around,” Forte said.
The final program of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival will be performed on the evening of July 19 at Lakeside Presbyterian Church in West Palm Beach, the evening of July 20 at First Presbyterian Church in North Palm Beach, and on the afternoon of July 21 at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Delray Beach.
It will open with the three founders, Fuller, Forte and Ellert, playing music of Shostakovich: Two of the Russian composer’s early piano preludes (Op. 34) as arranged for flute, clarinet and bassoon by the American flutist, composer and conductor Quinto Maganini.
That will be followed by a short, sentimental piece popular on violin recitals, the “Méditation” from Jules Massenet’s 1896 opera Thaïs. Violinist Mei Mei Luo will be accompanied by pianist Lisa Leonard.
The first half of the program ends with a masterwork for piano trio, the Ghost Trio (in D, Op. 70, No. 1) by Beethoven, so-called for the mysterious atmosphere of its slow movement. The performance features violinist Dina Kostic, cellist Susan Bergeron, and pianist Leonard.
The second half opens with a major early work of Johannes Brahms, the Serenade No. 2 (in A, Op. 16), as arranged from its orchestral original by the American bassoonist and educator Frank Morelli for an octet of flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, bassoon, viola, cello and bass.
“It’s such a great piece,” Ellert said. “I can’t get enough of it.”
The concert, and the festival, will close with a short two-movement work for 10 musicians — flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, bassoon, two violins, viola, cello and bass — by the 20th-century French composer Gustave Samazeuilh (1877-1967). The work, called Musette et Divertissement, is a section of a larger five-movement suite.
Samazeuilh’s quintessentially French piece, which is rarely heard in concert, is featured on one of the festival’s recordings, and it offers organizers the chance to feature most of the longest-serving musicians in the project on stage for the last hurrah.
“It’s a nod to our recordings, and it’s a nostalgia thing for us, and a really nice way to close the whole thing,” Fuller said. “It’s not long. It’s not a big, rousing piece.”
And, she notes, it ends quietly.
“It’s a little bittersweet, being the end for us, too,” she said.
If You Go
The Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival’s final performances are set for 7:30 p.m. Friday, July 19, at Lakeside Presbyterian Church in West Palm Beach; at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the First Presbyterian Church of North Palm Beach; and at 2 p.m. Sunday at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Delray Beach. Tickets are $30 apiece. Visit pbcmf.org or call 561-547-1010.