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If you were a participant in the 2007 Festival workshop, we want to know how the experience was for you! Each participant received an email with a link to the online evaluation. If that message gets misplaced, here is the direct link to the evaluation.
Let us know what you think--your voice matters.
Artistic Director Helen Callus and the Port Townsend Chamber Music Festival were featured in the Friday, August 10 issue of the Seattle Post Intelligencer. The feature was written by Philippa Kiraly. Helen talked about the pieces on tap for the weekend, as well as the broader educational context of the Festival.
Saturday, August 11, 7:30 pm
“The Romantics”
Joseph F. Wheeler Theater
Reserved seats: $19/22
Piano Quartet in G Minor, Op 25 Johannes Brahms
I. Allegro
II. Intermezzo: allegro, ma non troppo
III. Andante con moto
IV. Rondo alla zingarese: Presto
Trio Solisti: (Maria Bachmann, violin; Jon Klibonoff, piano; and Alexis Pia Gerlach, cello) with Helen Callus, viola
Intermission
Quintet in C Major Op 163 D 956 Franz Schubert
I. Allegro ma non troppo
II. Adagio
III. Scherzo: Presto, Trio: Andante sostenuto
IV. Allegretto
Maria Bachmann & Hal Grossman, violins; Helen Callus, viola; Alexis Pia Gerlach & Antonio Lysy, cellos.
Reserved seating is available by calling Centrum at 360.385.3102, x117 or by ordering online on our secure Acteva site.
If you are attending Wednesday's free Cistern concert, you might want to download a map to help you get there. We'll also have volunteers on hand to guide you.
Experience the living tradition of chamber music with favorites from Prokofiev and Smetana, and hear Paul Moravec’s Pulitzer Prize-winning composition Tempest Fantasy, played by the very trio for which it was written: Trio Solisti. Reserved seating is available by calling Centrum at 360.385.3102, x117 or by ordering online on our secure Acteva site.
Listen to an interview with Paul Moravec here. In this next link, listen to Paul Moravec and violinist Maria Bachmann talk about Tempest Fantasy. Paul Moravec is composer-in-residence at the Port Townsend Chamber Music Festival, and will be at the performance.
Friday, Aug 10, 7:30 pm
“From Shakespeare to Smetana”
Joseph F. Wheeler Theater
Reserved seats: $19/22
Romeo and Juliet Suite Sergei Prokofiev
I. Introduction
II. The Young Juliet
III. Dance of the Knights
IV. Balcony Scene
V. Mercutio
Helen Callus, viola; Robert Koenig, piano
Tempest Fantasy Paul Moravec
I. Ariel
II. Prospero
III. Caliban
IV. Sweet Airs
V. Fantasia
Trio Solisti: Maria Bachmann, violin; Jon Klibonoff, piano; Alexis Pia Gerlach, cello
with Alan Kay, clarinet
Intermission
Piano Trio in G Minor, Op. 15 Bedrich Smetana
I. Moderato assai
II. Allegro, ma non agitato
III. Finale: Presto
Hal Grossman, violin; Antonio Lysy, cello; Robert Koenig, piano
Performers
Helen Callus, Artistic Director of the Port Townsend Chamber Music Festival, is an international recording artist and the first elected female president of the American Viola Society. Her debut recording, Portrait of the Viola, and her subsequent recordings met with wide critical acclaim. Callus is Associate Professor of Viola at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Maria Bachmann, Alexis Pia Gerlach, and Jon Klibonoff join together as Trio Solisti to create performances that thrill audiences across Canada, Europe, and the United States. The New York Times describes Trio Solisti as “compelling and consistently brilliant,” and the Trio has been featured on national radio shows around the country. The Trio has released many recordings.
Hal Grossman is a professor of violin at the Interlochen Academy, and has served as Associate Professor of Music at Miami University. He is the winner of the International Cleveland Quartet and National Fischoff Chamber Music competitions, and has served as first violinist of the Oxford String Quartet.
Clarinetist Alan Kay appears frequently with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and has been featured at the Vail Valley Music Festival and the Yellow Barn Festival. He has performed with the award-winning ensemble Hexagon, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, and the Da Camera of Houston.
Pianist Robert Koenig has established a reputation as a much sought-after collaborative artist and chamber musician. Recent engagements have included performances at Alice Tully Hall in New York and Tokyo’s Suntory Hall. He is currently Assistant Professor of Piano and Chamber Music at the University of Kansas.
Cellist Antonio Lysy has performed worldwide in major concert halls, including the Royal Festival Hall, the Concertgebouw, and Teatro Colón. He has also appeared extensively as soloist with such orchestras as the Royal Philharmonic and Philharmonia Orchestras of London. He is currently Professor of Cello at UCLA.
Paul Moravec, recipient of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his work Tempest Fantasy, composes 
orchestral, chamber, choral, and lyric compositions, as well as film scores and electro-acoustic pieces. His many awards and fellowships include the Rome Prize, an NEA Composer Fellowship, and Rockefeller Foundation fellowship. Moravec is University Professor at Adelphi University.
PROGRAM NOTES
Romeo and Juliet Suite
Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) composed the ballet score Romeo and Juliet Suite between 1935 and 1936. Then in his mid-forties, Prokofiev was reaching the height of his artistic powers, as evidenced in the incredibly rich and varied textures, dramatic settings, and soaring melodies.
The “Introduction” establishes the big melodic themes that will permeate the entire ballet score and return again and again.
“Young Juliet” features three melodic character sketches associated with the character. The first is an energetic, scampering melody. The second is the graceful melody heard in the first movement. The third is a brief glimpse into the tragic melody which, in the ballet score, is the music to which Juliet will discover her fallen lover and then, heartbroken, take her own life.
“Dance of the Knights” is perhaps the most famous movement of the piece. The material is taken from the scene in which Romeo, Mercutio, and Benvolio have sneaked into the masked ball of their sworn enemies, the Capulets. The more gentle music that interrupts is the ladies’ dance during which, once again, we hear the familiar music from the “Introduction,” and where Romeo first sees Juliet dancing with a suitor and becomes intoxicated by her beauty. The movement ends with a return to the knights’ music.
“The Balcony Scene” is one of the most famous passages in all of dramatic literature. This movement is one almost unending melodic line filled with dramatic leaps of register.
“Mercutio” musically describes Romeo’s friend entertaining the unsuspecting company at the masked ball with his humor and wit. The music is lively and devilishly virtuosic, full of fast runs and challenging double stops. —Michael Lieberman
Tempest Fantasy (note by Paul Moravec)
Tempest Fantasy is a musical meditation on various characters, moods, situations, and lines of text from my favorite Shakespeare play, The Tempest. Rather than depicting these elements in literal, programmatic terms, the music uses them as points of departure for flights of purely musical fancy.
The first three movements spring from the nature and selected speeches of the three eponymous characters: Ariel, Prospero, and Caliban. The fourth movement, “Sweet Airs,” arises out of Caliban’s uncharacteristically elegant speech from Act III, Scene 2: “Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises/Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.”
The fifth movement, “Fantasia,” is the most “fantastic” flight of all, elaborating on the various musical elements of the previous movements and drawing them together into a convivial finale.
Tempest Fantasy was begun at the MacDowell Colony in the summer of 2001, and completed at Yaddo in the summer of 2002. It is dedicated with great admiration and affection to David Krakauer and the members of the Trio Solisti (Maria Bachmann, Alexis Pia Gerlach, and Jon Klibonoff)—who gave its premiere at The Morgan Library in New York City on May 2, 2003. —Paul Moravec
Piano Trio in G Minor, Op. 15
Chamber music played a very small part in the works of Czech composer Bedrich Smetana (1824-1884). Though few in number, however, his three chamber music compositions played an important role in his musical output. His two string quartets and the piano trio all held extra-musical significance for Smetana.
The Piano Trio evokes a poignant and tragic time in the composer’s life. The death of his oldest daughter, then only five years old, caused the composer to give vent to his grief through the intimacy of chamber music.
Smetana completed the Piano Trio in just two months. The premiere performance took place December 3, 1855, in the Prague Konvict Hall, with Smetana himself as pianist. The first movement, “Moderato assai,” is by turns turbulent and grief-filled, and contains a lovely cadenza for piano. Smetana departs from the usual three-movement format in that the second movement, “Allegro ma non agitato,” is not the usual slow movement, although it contains two sub-sections marked Alternativo I and Alternativo II, which serve as introspective interludes. The third movement’s principle theme is derived from the tune “S’il Jsem Proso Na Souvrait” (“I Was Sowing Millet”), a protest song associated with the Rebellion of the eighteen-forties. This movement eventually slows down to a funeral march marked “Grave, quasi-marcia,” followed by an impassioned song and finally a return to the Presto. —Sierra Chamber Music Society
"This is where you have been forever and will always be forever." (Stuart Dempster, speaking about what it
feels like to be in the Cistern, where time sometimes seems to stop.)
Join us on Wednesday, August 8, at 7 pm on the upper hill at Fort Worden State Park as multi- instrumentalist Stuart Dempster performs improvisatory compositions for didgeridoo, conch shell, and trombone as part of the dedication of the naming of the Dan Harpole Cistern.
The concert will also celebrate the Cistern’s centennial (it was built in 1907). Listen to a recording of Dempster playing in the Cistern here! (Here, you can listen to a cistern recording by flutist and recorder player Laura Sterling.)
Dempster, celebrating his 75th birthday on that day, will become one of the first artists to perform from inside the Cistern, a former water tank with a 45-second reverberation time. Speakers will conduit the music up to audience members seated on the lawn above.
Dempster is a trombonist, composer, didgeridoo players, and professor emeritus at the University of Washington. He has recorded for numerous labels, including Columbia, Nonesuch, and New Albion. His albums include In The Great Abbey of Clement VI, Underground Overlays from the Cistern Chapel and Sound Massage Parlor. A member of Cathedral Band and Deep Listening Band, he has toured extensively. Dempster is also known for his work in musical healing.
In his August 8 performance, Dempster will be accompanied by trombonist Kevin Karnes, trombonist David Marriott and didgeridoo player Brian Pertl.
Kevin Karnes teaches music history at Emory University in Atlanta. His musical work explores the intersections of musical creativity with broader discourses art, modernity, and cultural identity. Karnes completed his Ph.D in musicology and has published on Johannes Brahms, Austrian theorist Heinrich Schenker, and Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick.
David Marriott is co-leader, with his brother, Thomas, of the award-winning Marriott Jazz Quintet. He also leads his own jazz groups, including Septology and the Crimson Pentagram Brigade. He is a member of the Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra, Emerald City Jazz Orchestra and the New York City-based Brian Lynch Big Band.
Brian Pertl is a musician and ethnomusicologist. He has studied the didgeridoo in Australia and has studied Tibetan Buddhist sacred music in Tibet, Nepal and India. He has performed widely on didgeridoo, dung chen, trombone, and other wind instruments from around the world. He has released three CDs: Echoes from the Dreamtime, The Didgeri Dudes, and Under the Earthtones, which was recorded in the Cistern.
On June 14, 2007, the Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission named the Fort Worden cistern the “Dan Harpole Cistern” in honor of Harpole’s life and work in the arts.
“Harpole was dedicated to educating policymakers and the public about the importance of the arts to the fabric of community life,” says Centrum Executive Director Thatcher Bailey. “His personal and professional mission was to create opportunities for connecting people to the arts.”
Harpole also tried to get the cistern designated as “Washington’s Official Instrument” in recognition of its unique acoustic properties, but was unable to get legislation passed. Nevertheless, thanks to his tireless advocacy, musicians were able to navigate government red tape and record inside the Cistern safely, Dempster said.
“One of Dan’s greatest strengths was bringing people together,” said Centrum program manager Peter McCracken. “He was able to find common ground among widely divergent groups of people.”
In addition to serving as Centrum’s assistant director, Harpole served on the Port Townsend City Council from 1994 to 1996. In 1995, then-Governor Gary Locke appointed Harpole to the Washington State Arts Commission; he was elected chairman in 1998.
Harpole also served on the Jefferson County Commission from 1997 to 2000. In 2000, Harpole moved to Boise, Idaho, to become executive director of the Idaho Commission on the Arts.
A week before his death from a rare form of cancer in December, 2006, Harpole was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Chairman’s Medal in recognition of his service to the arts in the United States.
06/21/09-06/28/09: Port Townsend Chamber Music Festival
