A few photos of our audience

The audience was filled to capacity for our season opening concert, Beethoven’s Septet in E Flat Major.

In the news

Miriam Durkin, Arts Editor for the Charlotte Observer, featured our programs in her season highlights! 

Surprises fill arts season

By Miriam Durkin
mdurkin@charlotteobserver.com

Posted: Friday, Aug. 29, 2008

When you hear a “Pop!”, you know you’re in for a surprise. That’s why I like the “Pop Goes the Season” cover on this year’s season preview. It’s a reference to the Andy Warhol pop art exhibit coming to the Mint in October. But it has a double meaning: The events in store this season might surprise you.

If you’re new to the arts scene, let me share my favorite surprises in each of the areas we cover:

Dance: Dance fan who like the steamy duets on “So You Think You Can Dance,” will love North Carolina Dance Theatre’s annual Innovative Works program. No pink tutus here. The music rocks. The moves are athletic and often sensual. In fact, Innovative Works’ choreographer Dwight Rhoden created a passionate segment for TV’s SYTYCD this summer. You can check out his work on YouTube. Or you can see it up close at the intimate Booth Playhouse in November.

Books: When’s Charlotte’s Novello Festival was created 18 years ago, it quickly became a model for other libraries, and has always brought publishing’s giants to our city. This year it’s Khaled Hosseini (“A Thousand Splendid Suns”). In years past, it’s been John Grisham and Tom Clancy. The surprise? These writers are just as entertaining speaking as they are on paper. For as little as $15.

Music: Savvy uptown workers already know this gem: The first Tuesday of each month, chamber musicians play a free lunchtime concert at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church. It’s an amazing island of sanity in the middle of our too-stressful work lives. The Suits pack the pews. This year the name changes from Chamber Music at St. Peter’s to Charlotte Chamber Music, and the venue changes, too. Look for the schedule under the new name in our Music section.

Visual Arts: One of the finest corporate art collections in the world is owned by Bank of America – thousands of pieces with names including Milton Avery, Helen Frankenthaler, Frank Stella, even Norman Rockwell. The bank not only lends its artwork to the chieftains’ offices, it also puts it on view across the country, including Bank of America Gallery at the Hearst Center. Look for American Impressionists in October. (Tip for travelers: A major exhibit of BofA holdings is currently on view at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia through Sept. 21.)

Theater: Actor’s Theatre of Charlotte, a semiprofessional troupe that produces edgy new plays, makes it sinfully easy to show up: You don’t dress up. You don’t pay for parking (the lot is right next to the building). You can usually grab a ticket at the door. It’s one of the easiest and best theater tickets in town.

So, if you are ready to expand your artistic horizons, pop into any of these events.

Season Opens September 2

A new season is only two weeks away! It opens with a piece of music from Beethoven that was one of his most popular during his time. Alan Black, Artistic Consultant to Chamber Music at St. Peter’s shares:

Beethoven’s Septet in E Flat Major, Opus 20, was composed early in his life and is one of Beethoven’s most happy and lighthearted works. Written for the unusual combination of seven instruments that included woodwinds plus violin, viola, cello, and bass, the Septet was one of his most popular works at the time it was written. The style of the Septet belongs more with the music of Mozart and Haydn, and Beethoven used this piece as an exercise to learn how to write chamber music.

 

Joins us for our opening concert, and as always, for free. Parking is available in the TransAmerican building across the street from the church.

 

The concerts at 12N tend to be standing room only, so arrive early!! Concert begins at 12:10pm.

 

It’s the students’ turn!

The Chamber Music Teen Camp begins June 16!    Over 50 student artists will arrive Monday morning, eager to meet new friends, learn new music, and develop their creative and artistic abilities during this one week camp.

Not only will they play beautiful music, but through exposure to new disciplines like art class, theory composition, singing lessons, they will also develop their confidence, become a more versatile artist, learn to take risks and of course have fun!

Join us to enjoy the results of their hard work at either one of these events:

Faculty and Student Recital:   June 19 7:30pm at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church located on 115 West 7th Street. Tickets are $15, and available at the door or by calling: 704.335.0009

Student Final Concert:  June 20, 7:00 pm  at Christ Church located on 1412 Providence Road.  A reception follows and it is Free!

Questions: (704) 335.0009

Stanford Financial Excellence Award

Chamber Music at St. Peter’s was proud to have been selected as a finalist, but alas, we did not capture it. Congratulations to these outstanding organizations: Freedom in the Park, Wing Haven and The Raptor Center as winners of this award.

Finalist for the Stanford Financial Excellence in Culture Award

This award annually honors an Arts & Science Council operating support recipient that demonstrates exemplary fiscal management of their resources. Chamber Music at St. Peter’s is proud to be a finalist for the second year in a row.

Winners will be announced on April 2…stay tuned to find out if we win!!!

Background – The Stanford Group Company, in partnership with the ASC created the Standford Financial Excellence Award (SFEA) to annually recognize and reward cultural organizations with $50,000 to three organizations, plus regional artists.

Fiscally responsible organizations practice the following:

• Adequate financial resources to support stable, innovative programming.
• Available cash to sustain operations and programs during shortfalls.
• Accumulated surpluses which are greater than the current year’s deficit.
• An operating reserve and an endowment.
• Hold the professional and volunteer leadership responsible for the financial stability of the organization.

Henri Wieniawski

At the Benefit Concert on March 28, you will have the opportunity to witness technical wizardy and possibly fireworks as Liviu Prunaru plays this show piece.  View this video, which shows Jascha Heifetz (Violinist of the Century!) and the speed with which the hands move while playing this piece, as well as a close up and slow motion view.

Why you should not miss the Quartet for the End of time.

We will perform this work for our First Tuesday Concert in May, and you should mark your calendar now.  Read the following blog excerpt from blogger and superb pianist, Jeremy Denk about playing the piano part in Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time”:

Somewhere toward the middle of the last movement, I began to feel the words that Messiaen marks in the part, I began to hear them, feel them as a “mantra”: extatique, paradisiaque.  And maybe more importantly, I began to have visions while I was playing, snapshots of my own life (such that I had to remind myself to look at the notes, play the notes!):  people’s eyes, mostly, expressions of love, moments of total and absolute tenderness.  (This is sentimental, too personal:  I know. How can write about this piece without becoming over-emotional?)  I felt that same sense of outpouring (“pouring over”) that comes when you just have to touch someone, when what you feel makes you pour out of your own body, when you are briefly no longer yourself – and at that moment I was still playing the chords, still somehow playing the damn piano.  And each chord is even more beautiful that the last; they are pulsing, hypnotic, reverberant…each chord seemed to pile on something that was already ready to collapse, something too beautiful to be stable…and when your own playing boomerangs on you and begins to “move yourself,”  to touch you emotionally, you have entered a very dangerous place. Luckily, the piece was almost over….When I got offstage I had to breathe, hold myself in, talk myself down.

What does Yo Yo Ma have to do with Chamber Music at St. Peter’s?

Alan Black performs on a 1995 Moes & Moes cello, originally built for and owned by Yo-Yo Ma.