By Dennis D. Rooney The program of the inaugural concert of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival’s 26th season (which I heard Sunday at the Crest Theatre in Delray Beach) was opened by the organization’s three founders: flutist Karen Fuller Dixon; clarinetist Michael Forte; and bassoonist Michael Ellert, who performed a Divertimento in B-flat (Op. 12a) by Joachim Kötschau, … [Read more...]
Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival launches 26th summer season
For the past 25 summers, local musicians have come together in three different parts of Palm Beach County for a four-week series of 12 concerts of chamber music, much of it unusual and rarely heard, though always worthy. The Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival, which debuted in 1992 at the Duncan Theatre, returns for another summer starting tomorrow night at the Persson … [Read more...]
PBCMF 4: Unusual Italian works come up short
By Kevin Wilt The Palm Beach Chamber Music Summer Festival recently ended its 25th season with an afternoon concert July 31 at the Crest Theater in Delray Beach. The program consisted of chamber works by composers associated with larger, often grander forms: Ottorino Respighi with his colorful orchestral tone poems, Gaetano Donizetti and Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari with their … [Read more...]
PBCMF 3: A Dutch rarity, and chamber music from a film composer
The fascist darkness that covered the world of the 1930s and 1940s had well-documented effects on artistic life, and while we now celebrate the artists whose work either survived or reflected it, there were many other creators whose efforts are now shrouded in obscurity. Such a one was Rosalie Wertheim, a Dutchwoman whose gender worked against her as a composer and whose … [Read more...]
PB Chamber Fest 2: Rare Bruch and new McAlister
Over the past 30 years, the world of contemporary classical composition has moved, like so many things in our digital culture, into niches. There are hardcore atonalists, minimalists, New Romantics, and eclectics of every description vying for the ears of a busy audience. But in the United States, this flowering of different styles comes after the establishment in the … [Read more...]
PB Chamber Fest 1: Mozart concerto, chamber-style, enchants
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791), as painted by Barbara Krafft in 1819. The piano concertos of Mozart work well in chamber settings, as has been demonstrated by none other than the composer himself, who arranged several of them for piano and string quartet. This past weekend, members of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival did that one better with a reduced version of … [Read more...]
Casella work stands out on chamber fest’s challenging final concert
The Italian composer Alfredo Casella was a major figure in European music right up until his death in 1947, but his work rarely if ever gets a hearing today, at least on these shores. All the more reason for a tip of the hat to the organizers of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival, who programmed Casella's Serenata (Op. 46), written in 1927 for a quintet of … [Read more...]
Cohesion hard to come by in chamber performances
Two intimate works vied for contention with one of extrovert character Friday night as the third week of Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival concerts opened, but precious few of either kind of moment were satisfying for long stretches of time. The best performance of the concert at Palm Beach Atlantic University's Persson Hall came right at the beginning, with Carlos … [Read more...]