KINGSTON — The Kingston Chamber Music Festival will begin its 36th season on Wednesday, July 24, with a series of six concerts, all taking place in Edwards Hall on the campus of the University of Rhode Island.
The season will come to a close with a concert featuring the Dover Quartet performing the world premiere performance of a commissioned piece from Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate, a classical composer and citizen of the Chickasaw Nation.
This year’s concert series will be a celebration of “what makes the festival unique for performers and audience members alike,” said Artistic Director Natalie Zhu in an email.
“We challenge musicians,” said Zhu. “Many of them are playing together for the first time, and … are learning new repertoire. They thrive on the energy and excitement of the environment, and it fuels their creativity.”
The festival, which was begun in 1989 by David Kim, will kick off this season with Aaron Jay Kernis’ evocative “Air for Flute and String Quartet,” Zhu said, noting that one critic said the piece explores the flute’s expressive possibilities and provides the perfect showcase for the “seemingly boundless talent” of flutist Jennifer Grim.
Frédéric Chopin’s “Cello Sonata in G. minor, Op. 65,” will follow, featuring Zhu, playing with Cellist Clancy Newman in a piece that “is both riveting and jarring, while solidly coherent in statement, development and shape,” Zhu said.
Lastly, the magnificent and widely acclaimed “Piano Quintet in E-flat Major, Op.44” by Robert Schumann will be performed, a piece that “revolutionized the instrumentation and musical character of the piano quintet and established it as a significant — and quintessentially Romantic — chamber music genre,” Zhu said.
The July 26 program will present an array of compositions that include “blues tonality” and reflect the influence of African tonal complexity and rhythms on Western European, “manuscript-based” music,” she said.
The concert will open with Valerie Coleman’s “Wish: Sonatine for Flute and Pian.”
“Coleman wrote “Wish” while remembering the Middle Passage in which African people were trafficked across the Atlantic to be sold into slavery,” Zhu said.
On Sunday, July 28, music-lovers can experience something new, Zhu continued.
“While the novel pairing of a mandolin and classical guitar is rare in the chamber music world,” she said, concertgoers will be able to discover “how magnificently they complement each other … with this program.”
On Tuesday, July 30, Festival Founder Kim will share the stage with Zhu for a performance of Igor Stravinsky’s “Suite Italienne for Violin and Piano,” a piece, Zhu said, that is “full of charm and piquant flavor.”
Kim and his stand partner, Juliette Kang, first associate concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra, will also perform Sergei Prokofiev’s “Sonata for Two Violins in C Major, Op.56.”
In the second half of the concert, Kim and Kang will be joined by Che-Hung Chen (viola), Priscilla Lee (cello), Clancy Newman (cello), and Burchard Tang (viola) for Johannes Brahms’ “String Sextet No.1 in B-flat Major, Op.18.”
On Friday, Aug. 2, Ian Lin, a 14-year-old native Rhode Islander and piano student of Zhu, Meng-Chieh Liu and Dr. Ke-Chia Chen will perform Franz Schubert’s “Wanderer Fantasy in C Major” for the second annual “Young Artist Mini Recital.”
Following the “Mini Recital,” the Grammy-nominated Dover Quartet will return to Kingston with a repertoire featuring a world premiere performance Tate’s piece.
Tate, a classical composer and citizen of the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma (part of the Woodland people) wrote “Woodland Songs,” a five-movement piece, for the Dover Quartet, noting that it will be a “very rhapsodic and dramatic orchestration of the woodland animals that represent our clan system.”
Tate has also transcribed “Rattle Songs” by Pura Fé. Fé is of Tuscarora Indian heritage and one of the founding members of Ulali, a Indigenous women’s group whose music combines native roots and contemporary styles through vocals, drumming, rattling turtle shells, and stomping.
On Sunday, Aug. 4, the festival finale will feature a few favorites, Zhu said.
“I can’t wait to share my all-time favorites with our audience at the finale concert this summer,” she said. “Each piece on this program is filled with beautiful melodies that are passed between the instruments, creating a sense of unity and cohesion in the music, drawing the listener in with its emotional depth.”
Music-lovers are invited to open rehearsals on Saturday mornings from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., and a “Meet the Artist” series featuring interviews with different artists that will take place an hour before the July 24 and July 26 concerts.
Tickets for the Kingston Chamber Music Festival are now on sale and are available at www.kingstonchambermusic.org/tickets/ or by calling the Box Office at (401) 308-3614. Free tickets are available for anyone age 25 and younger, and all students.
