Chamber Music Northwest’s Summer Festival kicks off June 24 in Portland

Published 5:12 pm Thursday, June 15, 2023

“Poetry in Music” is the theme for Chamber Music Northwest’s Summer Festival (June 24-July 29). Chamber music is always intimate. The audience is so close to the source that they can hear the fingerprints on bass strings, see spittle in the air and dust falling from the bow.

Many of the music pieces will be accompanied by words. It could be Bach’s “Magnificat” or celebrity Oregon poets such as Kim Stafford or S. Renee Mitchell. All speakers and singers are accompanied by some of the most dedicated chamber players available.

“Local poets will be reading their own poetry, that is in some kind of response to the music for that night, so that’s really exciting,” CMNW spokesperson Nicole Lane said.

Artistic Directors Gloria Chien and Soovin Kim have brought word and music together for a summer festival with so many concerts the schedule can barely fit on the phone.

There are dozens of shows over five weeks. One of the best should be “Voices of the Soul,” featuring Fred Child of public radio’s “Performance Today” show reading his wife’s composition “Blame the Obituary.” She is Chinese-American composer Wang Jie. The world premiere for Pierrot ensemble and narrator is “a whimsical, comical and bleak musical picture of life during the trying last few years.” (Portland State University, Lincoln Performance Hall at 4 p.m. Sunday, July 23; and Reed College, Kaul Auditorium at 8 p.m. Monday, July 24.)

Also huge is the Emerson Quartet, disbanding after more than four decades as one of the world’s premier (nine Grammy Awards) chamber music ensembles, playing two concerts.

The first concert they play a West Coast premiere by Sarah Kirkland Snider, a Bartók quartet, and collaborate with clarinetist David Shifrin in Brahms’s last and perhaps greatest chamber ensemble work. In the second it’s Beethoven’s Opus 131 quartet, with Chien joining them in Robert Schumann’s piano quintet.

Besides standard bums-on-seats concerts there are free pre-concert sessions, at-home (streamed) concerts, and masterclasses. For example the Kenari Quartet will put on a Saxophone Masterclass with all the flavors of sax imaginable. There are also open rehearsals (free) and exclusive Garden Chamber Parties at $150 a pop.

The three freebies are:

July 14, 7pm Kenari Saxophone Quartet, North Clackamas Park with SoundsTruck NW

July 21, 7pm 2023 CMNW Protégé Artists, Gresham Arts Plaza with SoundsTruck NW

July 28, 7pm Columbia River Brass Quintet, Leroy Haagen Park in partnership with Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and SoundsTruck NW.

Consider this to be all the chamber music you need, squeezed into one month.