Three-Day Chamber Music Festival Features Many Composers
Series next weekend at Charles Allis Museum spans six centuries of music.
Milwaukee Chamber Music Festival. Graphic courtesy of Charles Allis Art Museum.
Whether experienced as a postlude to a glorious summer or the prelude to the start of a robust classical music season, the new Milwaukee Chamber Music Festival has crafted a unique blend of art, architecture, and music. The festival offers performances August 23-25 at the Charles Allis Art Museum, built in 1909 as the residence of Charles and Sarah Ball Allis.
The festival is a collaboration between the museum and conductor/pianist Yaniv Dinur, who also curates the Winterlude classical series at Villa Terrace, sister museum of the Allis. Working with Allis executive director Jaymee Harvey Willms and her team, he chose chamber works that connect to the museum spaces in which they will be performed by Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra musicians. The resulting concerts fill a summertime void in Milwaukee’s classical music calendar, and “push the boundaries of what a house museum can do,” according to Willms.
The opening concert on Friday, Aug. 23 is set in the museum’s French parlor, filled with artwork and furniture of French origin. Ilana Setapen, First Associate Concertmaster in the MSO, and Dinur will perform pieces by French composers and Beethoven’s epic Kreutzer violin sonata. The piano part will be played on an 1890 mahogany Steinway grand that belonged to Sarah Allis.
Saturday’s program invites the audience to explore both the museum and the classical repertoire via a choose-your-own concert experience. The evening opens with three programs presented simultaneously in various parts of the building. Cellist Madeleine Kabat will perform selections from J.S. Bach’s Cello Suites. A trio of Kyung Ah Oh, violin, Nathan Hackett, viola, and Shinae Ra, cello, will play W.A. Mozart’s Divertimento for String Trio. Duo Jennifer Bouton, flute, and Jay Shankar, clarinet, will present music of the 20th and 21st centuries. Listeners may attend any of these mini-concerts in their entirety, or sample them all. Following an intermission, musicians and audience will gather in the museum’s Great Hall to hear Pytor Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence for two violins, two violas, and two cellos. Performers are Setapen, Oh, Hackett, Kabat, Ra, and Nicole Swanson, viola.
The festival concludes Sunday, Aug. 25, with Olivier Messiaen’s powerful Quartet for the End of Time. Messiaen wrote the eight-movement work in 1941 while imprisoned in a German POW camp. The unusual ensemble of clarinet, violin, cello, and piano was dictated by the presence of fellow prisoners who could play those instruments. Dinur will play the keyboard part on an upright piano, recalling that, when the piece was premiered at the prison, Messiaen played “an out-of-tune upright…some of its keys would stick to the bottom of the keyboard while playing.”
Joining Dinur for the Messiaen are Shankar (clarinet), Jeanyi Kim (violin), and Peter Thomas (cello). The ensemble also will perform selections from J.S. Bach’s final work, Art of the Fugue, which was written for unspecified instrumentation.
The Milwaukee Chamber Music Festival will be held at the Charles Allis Art Museum, 1801 N. Prospect Ave., Milwaukee. Concerts begin at 7 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, and 2:30 p.m. Sunday. Individual concert tickets and a three-day festival pass are available online and at the door.
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