Performance Videos — Duluth Chamber Music Festival

Haydn: String Quartet in F Minor Op. 20 No.5 III. Adagio Felicity James and Yun-Ting Lee, violin Matt Young, viola Dane Johansen, cello Sayaka Tanikawa, piano Duluth Chamber Music Festival, Aug 2023 Weber Music Hall at University of Minnesota, Duluth https://duluthchambermusicfestival.org/

Shostakovich: Five Pieces for Two Violins and Piano I. Prelude Yun-Ting Lee, violin Matt Young, viola Sayaka Tanikawa, piano Duluth Chamber Music Festival, Aug 2023 Weber Music Hall at University of Minnesota, Duluth https://duluthchambermusicfestival.org/

Brahms: Piano Quartet in G Minor I. Allegro Yun-Ting Lee, violin, Jonathan Vinocour, viola Dane Johansen, cello Sayaka Tanikawa, piano Duluth Chamber Music Festival, Aug 2022 Weber Music Hall at University of Minnesota, Duluth https://duluthchambermusicfestival.org/

Clair de lune by Claude Debussy Sayaka Tanikawa, piano Duluth Chamber Music Festival, Aug 2022 Weber Music Hall at University of Minnesota, Duluth https://duluthchambermusicfestival.org/ == About this piece == Claude Debussy (1862-1918) began working on the four movement Suite Bergamasque in 1890, and the work was revised and published in 1905. Debussy often found inspiration in other art forms, and his radically modern approaches to composition were meant to awaken the listeners’ senses and to evoke musical images. His works were the musical equivalent to impressionistic paintings and symbolist poems, as characterized by the floating harmonies and subtle, luminous colors (even though he disliked being labeled as a musical impressionist). Suite Bergamasque was inspired by Paul Verlaine’s 1869 prose collection Fêtes galantes, which Debussy had already set to voice and piano before: Your soul is a rare landscape Where charming masquerades and dancers are promenading, Playing the lute and dancing, and almost Sad beneath their fantastic disguises. While singing in a minor key Of victorious love, and the pleasant life They seem not to believe in their own happiness And their song blends with the light of the moon, With the sad and beautiful light of the moon, Which sets the birds in the trees dreaming, And makes the fountains sob with ecstasy, The slender water streams among the marble statues. Debussy’s beloved Clair de lune, the third composition in the Suite Bergamasque, evokes the gossamer, dream-like quality of Verlaine’s poem.

Dohnányi: Serenade in C Major, Op. 10 II. Adagio non troppo Yun-Ting Lee, violin, Jonathan Vinocour, viola Dane Johansen, cello Duluth Chamber Music Festival, Aug 2022 Weber Music Hall at University of Minnesota, Duluth https://duluthchambermusicfestival.org/

Dohnányi: Senerade in C Major, Op. 10 I. Marcia: Allegro Yun-Ting Lee, violin, Jonathan Vinocour, viola Dane Johansen, cello Duluth Chamber Music Festival, Aug 2022 Weber Music Hall at University of Minnesota, Duluth https://duluthchambermusicfestival.org/

Moonbeams by Adam Birnbaum Yun-Ting Lee, violin, Jonathan Vinocour, viola Dane Johansen, cello Sayaka Tanikawa, piano Duluth Chamber Music Festival, Aug 2022 Weber Music Hall at University of Minnesota, Duluth https://duluthchambermusicfestival.org/ == About this piece == Born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, Adam Birnbaum (b.1979) studied at the New England Conservatory of Music before moving to New York City in 2001 as one of two pianists selected to participate in the Julliard School’s inaugural jazz studies program. In 2004 he won the American Jazz Piano Competition and became the American Pianists Association's Cole Porter fellow in Jazz. He has toured West Africa and Asia sponsored by Jazz at Lincoln Center and the U.S. State Department, and has performed or toured with jazz artists such as Al Foster, Greg Osby, Regina Carter, The Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, and Jazz at Lincoln Center with Wynton Marsalis, as well as with young artists such as Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society and Cécile McLorin Salvant. Birnbaum is also recognized as a composer and arranger. He currently serves as the Assistant Professor of Jazz at SUNY Purchase in NY. Birnbaum's "Moonbeams" is a musical homage to Claude Debussy's "Clair de lune” (“Moonlight”), heard earlier in tonight’s program. Birnbaum explains: "Moonbeams takes elements of Debussy's famous opus and plays with them--harmonically, rhythmically, and thematically--while adding jazz harmony and rhythm, fugue, and improvisational flourishes. In fact, the piece is meant to feel more like an improvisation than a carefully constructed composition. The opening figure in the strings is based harmonically on the last section of the original piece, and that theme becomes the thread that ties the piece together thematically as it weaves in and out of various other sections. At the conclusion of Moonbeams, a fragment of the opening melody from Debussy’s Clair de lune enters for the first time, giving the listener a concrete connection to the original piece as this one draws to a close.” Debussy’s Clair de lune and Birnbaum’s Moonbeams reflect magical evenings in Duluth when the sky is clear and the moon dances gently on Lake Superior.