This year at Eastman, about 330 students are enrolled in chamber music groups. Most perform this weekend in Eastman’s Chamber Music Extravaganza, a multiday chamber music festival where audience members can spend full days catching a variety of chamber groups. The concerts primarily take place in the acoustically brilliant and intimate Hatch Recital Hall and select concerts will be in Ciminelli Lounge in Eastman’s Student Living Center (across Main Street from the school).
This year’s performances represent the excitement of returning to normal rehearsals and performances after losing opportunities during Covid. “Those students now are here, and they’re ready to play,” says Anne Harrow, chair of the chamber music department and an associate professor of flute. “And I think they have more enthusiasm than ever before for playing chamber music together.”
The centerpiece concert will be an interdepartmental Honors Recital on Saturday in Hatch Recital Hall at 7:30 p.m. Groups audition for a spot on the concert. Harrow says that although judging can be subjective, the judges are all on the lookout for polish.
“It’s not a way of choosing the best group, because there probably is no best group,” she says. “But these were uniquely beautiful performances and so they’ve all been selected to play together on this concert.”
This year’s honors concert includes works by Barber, Beethoven, Prokofiev, and Mendelssohn, as well as some by more modern and contemporary composers John Stevens and Valerie Coleman. The groups range from string quartets and wind quintets to brass and string trios.
Although the rest of the concerts are organized by instrumentation and department, they won’t sound homogenous. “Any one of these concerts would be very interesting because all of them are going to have a lot of variety, even if it’s an entire string and piano concert,” says Harrow. “The repertoire is going to be varied.”
Additionally, audiences can get a prime seat in Hatch and feel a part of the performances. Harrow describes: “In chamber music, you feel like you’re really close to the performers. You can see them interacting with each other. There’s no conductor there. It’s just the group and it’s you. And if you want to sit in the front row, you can see the string players watching each other’s bows, the wind players breathing together, you can see the eye contact. They inspire each other but that physical interaction—it’s actually psychic interaction—that’s there between chamber musicians is actually very exciting to see.”
Harrow also sites research by cognitive scientists who have studied and measured the brainwaves of chamber musicians, observing how musicians’ bio rhythms sync up during performances. “Live performances are very exciting, and that sort of feeling really can’t be replicated with a recording,” she says.
The concerts are back-to-back, in festival format, but with enough time to grab a coffee and stretch the legs in-between.
Chamber Music Extravaganza Schedule:
Friday, April 28, 2023
String Quartet Seminar | 6:00 p.m. | Ciminelli Lounge
Saturday, April 29, 2023
Strings and Piano | 12:30 p.m. | Hatch Recital Hall
Graduate Seminar | 4:00 p.m. | Hatch Recital Hall
Woodwind Romance | 5:30 p.m. | Ciminelli Lounge
Honors Chamber Music | 7:30 p.m. | Hatch Recital Hall
Sunday, April 30, 2023
Strings and Piano | 12:30 p.m. | Hatch Recital Hall
Brass Chamber Music | 4:00 p.m. | Hatch Recital Hall
Woodwind Quintets| 7:30 p.m. | Hatch Recital Hall
To learn more about these performances, visit esm.rochester.edu/events.