ChamberFest Brown County 2023 is coming right up! The opening concert launches the season on Sunday, Aug. 13 at 7 p.m., at the United Methodist Church.
The first concert blends voice and piano to celebrate “Love After 1950: An American Song Recital.”
Pianist Dan Sato will accompany soprano Rachel Doehring and mezzo-soprano Katie Weber in works by Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Sheila Silver, Libby Larsen, Charles Ives and William Hirtz. Rounding out the concert are pianists Dan Sato and Andreas Ioannides performing a four-hand arrangement of The Wizard of Oz — not to be missed!
ChamberFest regulars will recognize pianist Andreas Ioannides, ChamberFest Artistic Director and recently appointed Assistant Lecturer of Piano and Chamber Music at the TU Dublin Conservatoire in Ireland. With a Doctor of Music degree from the IU Jacobs School of Music, Ioannides has performed across Europe, Asia, the Americas and beyond.
Dan Sato is on the faculty of the Setnor School of Music at Syracuse University. IU Jacobs School professor and world-renown pianist Andre’ Watts describes Sato as a musician of “exuberant spontaneity, deep conviction and serious compositional understanding.” Among his colleagues he’s known as a “human archive of pianistic knowledge and culture.”
Rachel Doehring is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University and the Bard College Conservatory Graduate Vocal Arts Program. Her operatic performances have been lauded as “lithe and agile … absolutely loveable.” She has worked with such luminaries as Peter Serkin and Dawn Upshaw, and was previously the producer of Resonant Bodies Festival, a three-day festival of contemporary music in Brooklyn, New York.
Katie Weber, another IU alum, is hailed by Opera News as a “confident singing actress with magnetic stage presence.” Other reviewers hail her “steely timbre and heartbreaking portrayal of lyric heroines,” and her “dramatic conviction and touching sensitivity.”
Closing concert, Aug. 19 at 7 p.m., United Methodist Church Rounding out ChamberFest Brown County is Schubert’s Piano Trio in No. 2 in E-flat and Piazzolla’s “The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires.”
Joining pianist Andreas Ioannides are violinist Kevin Lin and cellist Austin Huntington. Kevin Lin, originally from New York, is concertmaster of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. Previously a member of the London Philharmonic, Lin has also performed with the Pittsburgh Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, Royal Philharmonic and Singapore Symphony. He performs on an 1683 Stradivarius.
Austin Huntington is principal cellist of the Indianapolis Symphony. In the summer he is principal cellist for the Mainly Mozart Festival and Grand Teton Festival Orchestras. He is an avid chamber musician, whose collaborators include Itzhak Perlman, Jean-Ives Thibaudet, Garrick Ohlsson and Edgar Meyer. He chairs the Indianapolis Suzuki Academy Board of Directors.
Schubert’s Piano Trio No. 2 in E-flat (1827) is one of the composer’s greatest works. It is also one of his very last compositions, and beautifully displays that peculiar intensity, blending elements of dance, lyricism, harmonic invention and otherworldly grandeur that is associated with Schubert’s late music. You might recognize the haunting central theme of the second movement: it appears in multiple films, including Barry Lyndon, The Hunger, Crimson Tide, The Piano Teacher and throughout the BBC documentary “Auschwitz: The Nazis and The Final Solution.”
Argentinian composer Astor Piazzolla composed “The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires” for his quintet—bandoneon (a Spanish accordion popular in tango), piano, violin, electric, guitar and electric bass. Written between 1965 and 1970 as four pieces, it wasn’t initially a great success. Between 1996 and 1998, Russian composer Leonid Desyatnikov arranged the pieces for solo violin and string orchestra, harking back to the eighteenth century with quotes from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.
Stay tuned for more information about the concerts of ChamberFest Brown County 2023!
