The Trinity Alps Chamber Music Festival will present its sixth Digital Concert on the Zoom video meeting platform on Saturday, June 20, at 5:00pm Pacific Time. This program is called “Visionaries and Luminaries”, and will feature live performances of works by J.S. Bach, Frederic Chopin, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and George Crumb.
The concerts will be hosted by festival director Ian Scarfe, and feature interviews with musicians, musical performances, and a live Q&A session.
The June 20 program will begin with a performance by Canadian violinist Liana Berube, whose career has impressive range and depth. She has been heard on NPR, CBC, VH1, WFMT Chicago, and Dutch Radio 4, collaborating with prestigious symphony orchestras, chamber music ensembles and festivals, and pop and rock artists such as Stevie Wonder, Barry Manilow, Sting, Death Cab for Cutie, and the band Chicago. Berube will perform one of the original masterpieces for solo violin – Johann Sebastian Bach's Sonata in A Minor, one of the earliest example of how Bach could combine both expressive depth and weave multiple layers together in music for a single instrument. “Bach's Sonatas are intensely personal for me. This Sonata in particular manages to both capture struggle and difficulty while also providing much needed comfort and peace.”
Cellist Evan Kahn, a native of California, will continue the program with another Sonata, this time the Sonata for Solo Cello by the 20th century American composer George Crumb. Kahn is a prodigious performer in both chamber music and orchestral settings, and North State audiences may remember his performance of Elgar's “Cello Concert” with the North State Symphony and conductor Scott Seaton in May of 2018. “This Sonata is unexpectedly straightforward and heartfelt composition,” says Kahn, “written for his mother, Crumb tried to without the piece from being published, because he considered the music too old-fashioned, but eventually relented and had it released to the public at her insistence.”
The final set of the program will feature pianist Britton Day, who performs regularly at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and with musicians of the San Francisco Symphony, including his parents Robin McKee and Tim Day, both longtime stars of the SFS wind section. Day will perform a selection of works, including a lush arrangement of J. S. Bach's “Sheep May Safely Graze”, Frederic Chopin's thunderous “Revolutionary” Etude, and selected Preludes by the Russian Romantic Sergei Rachmaninoff.
To attend a Digital Concert, guests must register using an online form on the festival website, at www.TrinityAlpsCMF.org.