FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: LuAnn Bielawa, Director of Operations
luann.bielawa@maverickconcerts.org
845-594-6518
Annual Chamber Orchestra Concert with Simone Dinnerstein, Caroga Arts, and Conductor Alexander Platt
Saturday, August 26, 6:00 – 8:00 PM
Reserved Hall Seats: $60.00, $30.00, $27.50 (partial obstruction)
General Admission/Outdoors/Uncovered: $25.00, Students: $10
simonedinnerstein.com
carogaarts.org
alexanderplatt.com
Borromeo String Quartet
Sunday, August 27, 4:00 – 6:00 PM
(Reserved Hall Seats: $50.00, $29.00, $25.00 (partial obstruction)
General Admission/Outdoors/Uncovered: $20.00, Students: $10.00
borromeoquartet.org
Maverick Concerts
120 Maverick Road
Woodstock, NY 12498
https://maverickconcerts.org
Maverick Concert’s popular annual Chamber Orchestra Concert allows the renowned chamber music series to test the limits of its rustic, woodland stage, expanding its reach both in terms of instrumentation and repertoire. It also provides the Maverick audience with a chance to see Alexander Platt, Maverick’s beloved Musical Director and creative driver for two decades, as the rest of the musical world knows him: in his natural element as conductor and arranger.
The August 26 concert features one of the indisputable stars of the current classical music scene, the wide-ranging, iconoclastic Brooklyn pianist and Maverick regular Simone Dinnerstein. Acclaimed originally as a fresh and paradigm-changing Bach interpreter, Ms. Dinnerstein’s genre-blurring career path has taken her in all directions in space and time, deep into centuries of the classical music canon and well outside of it as well. Her 13 adventurous, personal, and thematically driven albums (including the revelatory Undersong featured in her 2022 Maverick solo performance)—have all reached the upper echelons of the Billboard Classical charts. The list of venues she has performed in, and ensembles she has performed with is, without exaggeration, comprehensive. At this concert, Ms. Dinnerstein comes home with a program-closing performance of J.S. Bach’s Piano Concerto in D Minor, BWV 1052, the first of the Baroque master’s sequence of 14 keyboard concerti written originally for harpsicord.
An unlikely story of musical excellence if ever there were one, The Adirondack-headquartered Caroga Arts Ensemble began when the promising young cellist Kyle Barrett Price brought seven of his Cleveland Institute of Music classmates to his grandmother’s community of Caroga Lake, where Price’s family often vacationed, for a 2012 performance at the Caroga Chapel. All seven musicians stayed at Price’s grandmother’s home, sleeping on sofas and double beds.
Far from those intimate beginnings but driven still by the same labor of love and commitment to community, the current Caroga Arts Ensemble, directed by Mr. Price, is comprised of top professional musicians from around the country who have performed at the Caroga Lake Music Festival, which formally began in 2016. Performers include top competition prizewinners, School of Music faculty and members of America’s leading orchestras. Caroga Arts Ensemble has performed at the Ravinia Festival (Highland Park, IL), Chicago’s Symphony Center, Maverick Concerts, TED-x Oaklawn (Oaklawn, TX), L.L. Bean’s Summer in the Park Series, and Proctors Theater. As the flagship ensemble of an organization that is committed to musical education, they have led weeklong educational residencies at the nearby Saratoga Performing Arts Center as well.
While gala events of this kind often stick to the “hits,” the robust program for the August 26 concert pairs masterworks from Bach and Mozart with an uncharacteristically accessible and pathos-filled early work by the father of modernism, Arnold Schoenberg, and the indescribably beautiful Adagietto from Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5.
Alexander Platt has built a unique career spanning the worlds of symphony, chamber music and opera. He is presently Music Director of the La Crosse Symphony Orchestra and the Wisconsin Philharmonic Orchestra, and Artistic Director for Music at the Westport Arts Center in Westport, CT. Previously, he also spent twelve seasons as Resident Coordinator and Music Advisor at Chicago Opera Theater, where he led the Chicago premieres of such landmark 20th Century operas as Britten’s Death in Venice, John Adams’ Nixon in China, and the world-premiere recording of Kurka’s The Good Soldier Schweik – all to high acclaim.
A graduate of Yale College, King’s College Cambridge (where he was a British Marshall Scholar) and conducting fellowships at both Aspen and Tanglewood, he started his career as the apprentice conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and the Minnesota Opera. He has guest conducted the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the Illinois Philharmonic, the Freiburg Philharmonic in Germany, the Aalborg Symphony in Denmark, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, the City of London Sinfonia, Camerata Chicago, the Banff Festival, the Ravinia Festival, the Aldeburgh Festival, and the Houston, Charlotte, Columbus and Indianapolis Symphonies. He has recorded for NPR and the BBC.
Mozart: Adagio and Fugue, K.546
Mahler: Adagietto from the Symphony No.5
Schoenberg: Transfigured Night (version 1943)
J.S. Bach: Piano Concerto in D Minor, BWV 1052
This concert is made possible through generous support from the Thompson Family Foundation.
The Borromeo String Quartet has enjoyed over three decades at the top of its craft, gaudily decorated with major awards and a coveted booking at all the finest venues and series. The Borromeo’s distinctions are many: winner of the 2007 Avery Fisher Career Grant; winner of Lincoln Center’s Martin E. Segal Award (2001); Winner of the Cleveland Quartet Award (1998); Ensemble-in-Residence for National Public Radio’s Performance Today (1998-99); Prize-winner at the International String Quartet Competition in Evian, France (1990).
The Borromeo continues to be a pioneer in its use of technology, and has the trailblazing distinction of being the first string quartet to utilize laptop computers on the concert stage. As the New York Times noted, “The digital tide washing over society is lapping at the shores of classical music. The Borromeo players have embraced it in their daily musical lives like no other major chamber music group.” In 2003 the Borromeo became the first classical ensemble to make its own live concert recordings and videos, distributing them for many years to audiences through its Living Archive, a music learning web portal for which a new version will soon be released.
The BSQ has been ensemble-in-residence at the New England Conservatory and Taos School of Music, both for 25 years, and has, for over two decades, enjoyed a long-term relationship with the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum where it continues to regularly appear. It is quartet-in-residence at the Heifetz International Music Institute, where first violinist Nicholas Kitchen is Artistic Director. The quartet was also in residence at, and has worked extensively as performers and educators with the Library of Congress (highlighting both its manuscripts and instrument collections) and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. The ensemble joined the Emerson Quartet as the Hittman Ensembles in Residence at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, and was recently was in residence at Kansas University, the San Francisco Conservatory, and Colorado State University, where it regularly appears.
The Quartet has collaborated with some of this generation’s most important composers, including Gunther Schuller, John Cage, György Ligeti, Steve Reich, Aaron Jay Kernis, Osvaldo Golijov, and Jennifer Higdon. In its recordings and performances, the Borromeo has emerged as specialists in the visionary late quartets of Beethoven and in the comparatively under-exposed cycle of Bela Bartók String Quartets. At the Maverick concert, the Borromeo String Quartet will perform Bartok’s String Quartet No.6 (1945)
Beethoven’s Quartet No.12 in E-flat, Op.127.
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Maverick Concerts, the oldest continuous summer chamber music festival in America, is set amid the serene Catskill woodland just outside Woodstock, NY. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the uniquely charming rustic hall has superb acoustics and is the ideal venue for an intimate encounter with chamber music. Maverick presents concerts by internationally renowned classical, jazz, and contemporary music ensembles from July through early September. Maverick Concerts sustains the vision of its founder, Hervey White, who built the historic concert hall in 1916 and opened his land and hospitality to artists, musicians, and the community. Concerts are on Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoons. Maverick Family Saturdays, short interactive events designed for kids of all ages, are free and open to everyone on Saturday mornings.
