GTMF players end chamber series on high note – JH News&Guide

Do you like piano music? The chamber music program Aug. 13 at Walk Festival Hall will have loads of it. Prefer strings? There will be plenty of that, too? Winds? You’re in luck.

The Grand Teton Music Festival’s Benoliel Chamber Music Series wraps up with one final program with music from three centuries and four countries.

Violinists Julianne Lee and Ling Ling Huang will join pianist Yvonne Chen for Shostakovich’s “Five Pieces for Two Violins and Piano” (1955).

Shostakovich (1906-1975) produced a huge amount of music in his relatively short life, including 15 symphonies, six concertos, 44 other orchestral works and 50 or so chamber works. He also wrote a lot of music for stage, ballet and film, some of which he asked his friend and student Lev Atovmyan to rearrange as chamber suites. These five pieces, for example, were taken from some of his ballet and film scores.

Chen returns for Brahms’ Clarinet Trio in A minor (1891) with Stephanie Key on the featured instrument and her longtime SOLI Chamber Ensemble colleague David Mollenauer on cello. The trio is one of just four chamber works Brahms (1833-97) wrote for clarinet, three of which (including this one) were inspired by his friendship with clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld. It is said that writing this piece broke Brahms out of a funk that had threatened to end his compositional career — a happy development, as he went on to write much more.

Chen also takes the lead in a 2017 piano quartet written by Danny Elfman (b. 1953), best know for the more than 100 film scores he has written for the likes of Brian De Palma, Peter Jackson, Joss Whedon, Ang Lee, Guillermo del Toro, Barry Sonnenfeld and Gus Van Sant, and his long association with Tim Burton starting with “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” right up to 2024’s “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” But he also has composed a handful of concert works, including this quartet commissioned by the Lied Center for Performing Arts, the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and the Berlin Philharmonic Piano Quartet. Joining Chen are violinist Karen Whitson Kinzie, violist Brant Bayless and cellist Seoyeon Min.

Finally, Dvořák’s Serenade for Wind Instruments (1878) brings together pairs of clarinets (Gregory Raden, Stephanie Key), oboes (Melissa Hooper, Zach Boeding), bassoons (Andrew Brady, Demetra Mikakos) and horns (Gail Williams, Bob Lauver), with a cello (David Garrett) and bass (Andrew Raciti) thrown in for good measure. Popular since the composer premiered it in Prague, the piece combines sounds, themes and moods of both the royal court and the common folk, by turns slow and nostalgic or lilting and dancelike. No less a critic than Brahms himself said of the work, “A more lovely, refreshing impression of real, rich and charming creative talent you can’t easily have. … I think it must be a pleasure for the wind players!”

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