“Our 63rd season explores what chamber music has been and what it is coming to be. We stretch backward with the Bach cello suites and reach forward with a Trio that performs works only by contemporary composers. Five and a half of our eight performing groups will be new to us. The others we welcome back with a growing sense of intimacy.

For me, chamber music has a great deal to do both with growing and with intimacy. In my youth it took a while for it to grow on me; and then it grew with me; and then I grew with it; and now it grows me. The more I listen, the more intimate my experience becomes. Strange to say, that intimacy is increased by sharing the experience with the 600 other people who come to listen to these powerful, moving public-private performances. I “hear” differently when surrounded by the mature, knowledgeable, and passionate people who, six or seven times a year, make up our audience and thereby create our Chamber Arts Society. So I thank you for your musical companionship and wish you an uplifting 63rd season.”

 

—George Gopen, Director

THE CHAMBER ARTS SOCIETY celebrates its 63rd season of outstanding chamber music programs during 2008–09 with six concerts by leading chamber ensembles.

While some concerts generally "sellout" to subscribers, individual tickets may be available at the box office beginning one hour before concert time on a first-come, first-served basis.

Since most of our tickets do sell to subscribers, you may wish to consider becoming a subscriber. To be placed on a list to receive the subscription series brochure for the 2007-08 season, please call the office of Duke Performances, 919-660-3356. Brochures are mailed in April for the following season.

The 2008-09 Chamber Arts Society Series is supported by Duke Performances, the Edith London Endowment Fund for the Chamber Arts Society, the Jacob Joseph and Ruth Marsey Blum Endowment Fund, the Ernest W. Nelson Fund for the Performing Arts, the Robert and Margaret Boyer Endowment Fund, and generous individual donors.

 

2008-09 Concert Season

CHIARA QUARTET
Saturday, September 6, 2008 at 8 pm
Reynolds Industries Theater

The Chiara Quartet lives up to its name, which means “clear, bright, and pure.” The ensemble has earned acclaim for transporting its vivid musical productions into venues that range from the bars of Brooklyn to Carnegie Hall. According to the New York Times, their impressive range extends from “glowing warmth to hard-edged acerbity.” Their program at Duke will begin and end with full four-movement Mozart quartets. Between these two, they will play a series of short, imaginative pieces by modern composers. The program will be presented in the round, in the intimate confines of the Nelson Music Room.

“Other musicians would kill for such shapely phrasing, the ends of which are nothing short of exquisite.”
 – National Public Radio

 

TOKYO STRING QUARTET &
DAVID SHIFRIN, CLARINET
Saturday, October 18, 2008 at 8 pm
Reynolds Industries Theater

With a host of Grammy nominations, over 40 landmark recordings, and influences ranging from Japan to Juilliard, the Tokyo String Quartet performs with elegance and maturity, along with what critics have called staggering dynamic control.

In this program of “5s,” the Quartet begins with the elegantly controlled fifth of Beethoven’s early quartets, expands with the fire and wit of Bartók’s fifth, and ends with what is often acknowledged as the greatest quintet ever written for clarinet and strings, the Brahms. For that stunning, 40-minute finale, they are joined by clarinet virtuoso David Shifrin, whom the San Francisco Chronicle calls “a revelation in just how beautifully the clarinet can be played.”

“The Tokyo is in a new era of musical power and finesse. The four players lavish total lustrousness and virtuosic ease.”
– Los Angeles Times

“Shifrin’s effortless virtuosity, thoughtful phrasing, and luminous tone were the soul of the performance.”
– The Oregonian

 

KUSS QUARTET
Saturday, November 15, 2008 at 8 pm
Reynolds Industries Theater

The Berlin-based Kuss Quartet has dedicated itself to restoring the string ensemble to its place at what they call “the cutting edge of cultural and compositional life.” Reaching from the Renaissance to the present day, their repertoire juxtaposes modern and classical content in what the Telegraph UK calls “a historical mosaic.” In their hands, both the most recognizable and the most challenging works seem “rebuilt as if from scratch and charged with a rejuvenated energy.” In this concert, their electric readings of Haydn and Schubert surround a work by contemporary composer Helmut Lachenmann, whose experiments in the production of sound and energy will afford a new context in which the older works can be heard.

“Every note, every phrase, every new motif appears dusted down, questioned, and joyfully restored.”
– Frankfurter Allgemeine

 

JAAP TER LINDEN, CELLO
A special two-concert event: Bach’s “Cello Suites”

Friday, December 5 and Satuday, December 6, 2008 at 8 pm
Nelson Music Room

Jaap ter Linden is a specialist in early music, an authority on antique instruments, an internationally acclaimed conductor, and perhaps the world’s finest baroque cellist. His 2006 interpretations of the Bach cello suites earned praise for their deliberate phrasing and quietly incandescent power. Rejecting sentimentalism, ter Linden layers these works with a sense of elegant intimacy making the Nelson Music Room the perfect venue for these two concerts.

 

SIMONE DINNERSTEIN, PIANO
& ZUILL BAILEY, CELLO
Saturday, January 17, 2009 at 8pm
Reynolds Industries Theater

Simone Dinnerstein has staggered reviewers from outlets as varied as the New York Times, Piano Magazine, and Oprah’s O, which called her work “timeless, meditative, [and] utterly audacious.” Her solo debut issue of the Bach Goldberg Variations (2007) was perhaps the most widely reviewed and critically debated recording of the year. “With the specter of Glenn Gould’s own epoch-making 1955 debut playing the same work - not to mention a vast catalog of competing interpretations - Dinnerstein is nothing if not bold.” She appears in linked events at Duke, including a master class (January 15) and a solo recital (January 16). But the culmination of her visit is this duo recital with longtime collaborator Zuill Bailey, whose work on the cello in known for a romantic intensity that the Washington Post calls “lyrical and intimate.” The duo’s all-Beethoven program brings us half of their complete recording of the Beethoven piano-violin sonatas (2006, 2008), which has won praise for its precision, chemistry, and - best of all - “drama.” (American Record Guide)

“They take chances at every turn, with results that consistently take you deeper into the music.”
— Philadelphia Enquirer

 

CLAREMONT TRIO
Saturday, Febuary 21, 2009 at 8pm
Reynolds Industries Theater

Hailed as “deft, exhilarating, and imaginative” by Strings Magazine, the Claremont Trio couples a powerful, energetic style with an uncommon assurance. First recipients of the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson International Trio Award, the Claremonts - sisters Emily Bruskin (violin) and Julia Bruskin (cello), with Donna Kwong (piano) - generate enthusiastic acclaim wherever they perform. The Naples Daily News called them “the freshest breath of air in the world of chamber music today.” They aspire (in their own words) to make their music “exhilarating, heart-wrenching, and ultimately life-changing.”

Their program replicates for us their first public concert together, in celebration of their 10th anniversary as an ensemble. It itself is a journey back in time - from our contemporary, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, to Ravel of the early 20th century, and then to Schubert of the early 19th century.

"The trio is a superbly accomplished young group with much intuition among the musicians, backed by splendid training, technique, and dash."
— Strings Magazine

 

AHN TRIO
Saturday, March 28, 2009 at 8pm
Reynolds Industries Theater

Technically superb and blazing with talent, the Ahn Trio plays adventurous repertoires with a style that the Toronto Star says has “all the youthful fire, passion, and commitment one could possibly want.” These three sisters were born in Korea and studied together at Juilliard. Since then they have been carving a path that has helped them expand the very definition of the term “chamber music.” Although they have long mastered the classical repertoire, they now play pieces exclusively by contemporary composers. In response to their bold initiative, a number of our most talented composers have written works expressly for them. Come to this concert expecting to hear (1) music that you’ve never heard before, (2) music that you’ve never heard before in a chamber concert, and (3) music that will engage your mind and your heart on first listening.

"Their technique is impressive, and they balance unanimity and individuality in a spirit that is at the heart of chamber music."
— Washington Post

 

EMERSON STRING QUARTET
Saturday, April 25, 2009 at 8pm
Reynolds Industries Theater

The Emerson String Quartet has played with subtlety and vigor for thirty years, demonstrating in every performance why the New York Times calls them “technically resourceful, musically insightful, cohesive, full of character and always interesting.” Often acclaimed as the world’s finest string quartet, they bring their dynamic skill to this program that works as an intergenerational meditation on romanticism. Three post-romantic contemporaries - Prokofiev, Bartók, and Webern - are set against a composer one generation older, Dvorák, whose lavish homage to romance, Cypresses (a cycle of songs without words), turned poetry into music in an effort to win the heart of one Josefina Cermáková, in 1860s Prague.

"With musicians like this, there must be some hope for humanity."
— London Times