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Ottawa Chamberfest | Chamberfest 2023 Closing Night Mashup
August 3, 2023 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
$59
Chamberfest 2023 is closing with a bang, Chamberfest style! We’re rounding up some of the world’s finest chamber musicians for a mashup concert, featuring performances by star-studded Chamberfest Artists-in-Residence Lauren Anker, Bryan Cheng, Philip Chiu, Chamberfest Artistic Director Carissa Klopoushak, Emily Kruspe, Sean Rice, and special guest violist Nadia Sirota. This collaborative event features chamber music favourites, new music, and music from around the world in a program celebrating the old and new, expressed in the spirit of fresh observation and collaboration.
The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution.
– Paul Cezanne (attributed)
The concert opens with Gabriella Smith’s “Carrot Revolution,” an electric work introduced to Chamberfest by celebrated violist and cultural tastemaker Nadia Sirota. Named for the (attributed) Cezanne quote, the piece is a patchwork of Smith’s wildly contrasting influences and full of weird, unexpected juxtapositions and intersecting planes of sound, inspired by old works in new contexts and drawing connections between things seemingly unrelated.
We close the first half of the program with Dohnanyi’s last chamber work: the epic yet overlooked and underperformed Sextet in C major. Featuring the unusual combination of clarinet, horn, piano, violin, viola and cello, the sextet opens with a heroic horn theme. While the first and second movements favour the dark and tumultuous, the third features a lighter, Brahmsian theme and variations introduced by the clarinet. This flows directly into the Finale, which has been described as sounding “like an inebriated Viennese hotel band’s haphazard attempt to render Gershwin.” You’ll hear 1930s’ European jazz influences injected with lopsided Viennese waltzes, and a cabaret-type coda combining all of this with the opening heroic theme.
The second part of the evening opens with an exclusive acoustic set of Balaklava Blues’ inimitable “hyper-folk-noir,” exploring Mark and Marichka’s first-hand experiences of revolution and war in Ukraine (in new arrangements with string quartet co-commissioned by Chamberfest.) We enter full-on party mode with a set of from Chamberfest favourites, Toronto’s original guerrilla-folk party-punk massive Lemon Bucket Orkestra.
This concert will revolutionize what chamber music was, is, and can be. Let the magic and energy of this once-in-a-lifetime performance capture you on this special night – the final concert of Chamberfest 2023.
