Jan Holloway: ChamberFest brings audiences an intimate setting

You know how it sounds, what it feels like. Conversation with friends. You launch an idea. It widens, narrows, doubles back, complicates. Add discord. Harmony. A new thread. It’s a journey. What’s around the next corner? A burst of laughter. A gleam of recognition.

Set this to music and you have chamber music – a conversation among instruments. Chamber music creates an intimate world that says in music what we can’t put into words.

Brown County is becoming a chamber music destination. ChamberFest – where music and nature meet – is Brown County’s venue for the best in chamber music.

Now in its third year, ChamberFest Brown County brings world-class musicians to venues across downtown Nashville for a week of music, workshops, and educational experiences. Nashville’s intimate performance spaces put listeners and performers in close proximity. This ignites interaction. We see performers up close, expressing the emotions written into the music.

Performers introduce each piece, placing it in the context of the composer’s life and work, including the life events and emotions that inspired the piece—love, tragedy, nostalgia, passion, or joy.

We relate to composers as fellow beings, expressing common emotions in their music. We become part of the musical conversation.

A prelude

Violinist Hyunjee Chung and pianist Kyunghoon Kim will perform works by Beethoven, Yun, and Prokofiev. The performers’ backgrounds and achievements speak to their uniqueness.

Both have performed extensively across the US and abroad. Chung was born and raised in Seoul and holds a doctor of musical arts degree from Boston University. She is assistant professor on the violin faculty at the New World School of the Arts at Miami Dade College.

She’s interested in making known chamber music’s “hidden gems,” especially those among Robert Schumann’s later works.

Pianist Kyunghoon Kim, a native of South Korea, made his debut at 12. He holds a doctor of music in piano performance from Indiana University, and is visiting lecturer in chamber and collaborative music at the IU Jacobs School of Music.

He’s also an arranger of classical, jazz, and pop songs for piano, and is a member of the project “Through Music All is Possible,” which connects educators in the US with students in Kenya.

Join us for this conversation in music at the Winter Benefit Concert, Saturday, Jan. 21 at 7 p.m., at Nashville United Methodist Church, 48 S. Jefferson St.

Admission is free, donations welcome to support ChamberFest 2023.

About the program

Beethoven Sonata for Violin and Piano No 6 in A Major, Op. 30, No. 1: Beethoven composed this sonata in his 30s, when the piano was becoming popular as a “domestic instrument.” More people were playing music at home, and publishers were looking for pieces that would fit that market. At the same time, Beethoven was in such despair at his growing deafness he considered suicide.

According to Orrin Howard, writing for the LA Philharmonic, Beethoven “resolved not to leave the world until he had ‘brought forth all that I felt called upon to produce.’” As if rejoining the living with new resolve, Beethoven expresses in this sonata what Howard calls “a distinctly formed individuality almost free of the ties that bound him to his predecessors.”

Isang Yun, Gasa (1963): Yun was born in South Korea, and began writing music at the age of 12. He is recognized for blending traditional East Asian and Western composition techniques.

Prokofiev Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 in D Major, Op. 94a. (1942-43): This sonata was written as the Soviet Union came under Nazi threat, and Prokofiev and fellow artists fled the major cities for the North Caucasus and Ural Mountains.

That same threat distracted Stalin from enforcing the restrictions he’d placed on artists, so Prokofiev was free to voice his musical expression (and his anti-Stalin sentiments) in what some call a “blythe and lyrical” sonata.

Prokofiev wrote the sonata for flute, but the renown violinist David Oistrakh persuaded him arrange it for violin. Its 1944 American premier in Boston involved a manuscript smuggled out of the Soviet Union. This sonata is now one of Prokofiev’s most popular chamber works.

Jan Holloway is a Brown County resident and a writer and editor at Indiana University. She is also a member of the board of ChamberFest Brown County. She can be reached at [email protected]. Send comments to [email protected].