Maverick Concerts, America’s oldest continuous summer chamber music festival and winner of the Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, thrives on the love of great music and the spirit of its unique site in the unspoiled woods. The rustic 1916 concert hall, with its perfect acoustics, is ideally suited to chamber music and the intimacy of live performance.
Maverick Concerts continues the vision of Hervey White, founder of the collaborative Maverick Art Colony. Artists and other volunteers built the hand-hewn “music chapel” in 1916 and the Hall is now a multi-starred attraction on the National Register of Historic Places.
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the Hall photographed at dusk by Simon Russell |
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FROM MUSIC DIRECTOR ALEXANDER PLATT:
THE ROMANTIC GENERATIONS: BARBER/SCHUMANN/CHOPIN
2010 is a year of celebrations. We will celebrate the 95th consecutive season of the Maverick, the romantic generations of Barber, Schumann and Chopin, the centennial of the birth of American composer Samuel Barber and the bicentennial of the birth of the great composers Frédéric Chopin and Robert Schumann. We focus on their worlds in a way that combines old and new, familiar and forgotten, performed by brilliant artists from around the world.
The bedrock of the festival is an extensive survey of this and other music performed by eminent musical artists who return each season to our pure music chapel. We again welcome the Tokyo, Shanghai, Miro and Amernet quartets, the Imani Winds, and pianist Pedja Muzijevic.
Soprano Maria Jette returns with pianist Alan Murchie in the rare program I call Gay Life: Barber, Schumann, and the New York Art-Song Tradition, and pianist Mei-Ting Sun will be back with an all-Chopin program. The sublime Trio Solisti will perform music from the great Romantic Generation: Schumann, Mendelssohn, Chopin.
We will welcome new artists as well, including the acclaimed young Parker Quartet with pianist Shai Wosner, as well as Opus Two and, from Paris, the famed Quatuor Ebene. Canadian violinist Lara St. John will make her Maverick debut in a solo violin program featuring Sonatas by J.S. Bach and Eugene Ysaye, along with the premiere of a new work that she is commissioning solely for the occasion.
New music once again features prominently at the Maverick in such a way as to blend seamlessly with the summer’s standard repertoire. Befitting our 95th anniversary, we will have two world premieres: the chamber orchestra version for piano left hand of Daron Hagen’s Seven Last Words and James Matheson’s Piano Quintet performed by the Borromeo Quartet and Judith Gordon.
Further, we feature tributes to American composers associated with Maverick, including Cowell, Cage, Corigliano and Starer.
The culmination of the summer, in what has become a new Maverick tradition, is the annual chamber orchestra concert, featuring the Maverick Chamber Players, which I will personally conduct. I have invited pianist Joel Fan to return for a program I call Hagen, Barber, Chopin: A Trio of Anniversaries.
Our eclectic Saturday-night series at the Maverick continues with the great legendary folk singer Happy Traum, brilliant jazz composer and pianist Fred Hersch and Indian music master Steve Gorn.
Please join me for all of these wonderful musical events and our four exciting Young People’s Concerts with the Imani Winds, Betty MacDonald, Garry Kvistad and Bill Cahn from the acclaimed percussion group Nexus and the triumphant return of Elizabeth Mitchell and Family.
I look forward to the great pleasure of welcoming you once again.
Alexander Platt
