Review: Timeless chamber music fest enchants in a historic Austin setting

By Michael Barnes, Austin 360, June 2, 2021

The tree remembers.

Or so I imagined as the Schumann Chamber Players opened the Austin Chamber Music Festival during an enchanted evening on the lawn of the historic Neill-Cochran House.

The tree in question is an enormous heritage pecan that sheltered the festival audience at dusk on May 27. Like the nearby 1855 Greek revival house on San Gabriel Street — with its six tall white columns and thick limestone walls — that tree likely witnessed many a musical and social event like this one during its 166-year history.

When built, the stately house perched on the rim of the Shoal Creek Canyon, located about a mile outside the Austin city limits. These days, West Campus, which surrounds the house, has become the most densely populated residential zone in the city.

Then as now, the murmur of doves and the chittering of chimney swifts would have competed gently with the sounds produced by instruments similar to the ones used this evening. The clatter of horses and mules and the clang of carriages and wagons has since been replaced by the whooshing of cars, the whop-whop-whop of helicopters and the random snide pop of a gunned motorcycle.

Despite these potential distractions, Thursday’s seated audience never took their eyes or ears off the trio of musicians seated on the front porch — Austin classical royalty, really — Michelle Schumann on piano, Sandy Yamamoto on violin and Amy Levine-Tsang on cello. In fact, quite a few passersby stopped to soak up the music. Some lingered on grassy spots outside the painted iron fence.

Schumann, always an entertaining and enlightening speaker, introduced the three pieces. Her group picked up the mood of the past pandemic year with the Trio Élégiaque No. 1 by Sergei Rachmaninov, which the composer wrote at the death of his mentor, Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Although the concert was lightly amplified, it still took a few minutes to adjust to the acoustics of the place during such a quiet piece of music.

American jazz composer David Baker mixed classical and jazz legacies for his “Roots II,” here represented by “Jubilee,” “Sorrow Song” and “Boogie Woogie,” which lightened and expanded the atmosphere.

The players were only getting started. Piano Trio No. 1 by Felix Mendelssohn — the only composer on the bill whose life predated the setting for this Austin concert — encapsulated a range of feelings associated with the current phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. We can grasp the somber moods of the first movement, the reflective sensibility of the second, the frisky playfulness of the third — few composers do frisky like Mendelssohn! — and the liberating complexity of the fourth.

It would be hard to improve on the performances of each piece. The novel setting made it all the more exceptional after more than a year without in-person chamber music.

As Austin’s arts and entertainment scene reopens one sector at a time — on the same night, Black Pumas played their second sold-out, full-capacity show of the week at Stubb’s — you can sense the excitement on the streets. Part of what defines Austin as a city is in the process of waking from a long nightmare.

If you go
The Austin Chamber Music Festival continues with the Artisan Quartet on June 3, Invoke on June 10, Artina McCain & Friends on June 17 and Festival Piano Quartet on June 24 at the Neill-Cochran House Museum Lawn, 2310 San Gabriel St. and online. Free-$40. acmc.gameflow.design.

See This Show: Austin musicians bolster ‘The Power of Friendship’ to benefit storm victims

By Michael Barnes, Austin 360, March 2, 2021

Perhaps because several of its leaders count as genuine visionaries, the Austin classical music community is unusually innovative, as well as collaborative.

Consider just a few of the top-flight talents who quickly banded together to create the digital fundraiser, “The Power of Friendship: Winter Storm Benefit Concert.” The distinguished list includes Oliver Rajamani, Daniel Fears, Devin Gutiérrez, Thomas Burritt, Craig Hella Johnson and Conspirare, Matthew Hensley and Austin Classical Guitar, Michelle Schumann and Austin Chamber Music Center, as well as the Miró Quartet from the University of Texas.

Partly recorded live on Feb. 26 at the Draylen Mason Music Studio in the new KMFA 89.5 complex in East Austin — the radio station served as a producing partner, too — this digital show is expected to be available through March on YouTube. Storm response beneficiaries include Black Leaders Collective, Central Texas Food Bank and Impact Now Dove Springs.

Everything about this concert — from the first guitar, piano and violin treatment of a delicate Debussy prelude to Gutiérrez’s soulful, jazzy rendition of Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend” — revealed a shared, quiet musical affinity, along with “a close kinship” among the artists, as Johnson said during the show.

Early on, Conspirare, Austin’s widely admired virtuoso choir, contributed the cohesive and calming “See How the Earth” by Ross Lee Finney. This piece, like several others, had been recorded in advance.

Local singer-songwriter Fears, who participates in Austin Classical Guitar’s award-winning social/musical programs, performed one of his own songs, the heartbreakingly direct “Get Right, Get Free.”

Rajamani, the evening’s main guest artist, unveiled two sets of three pieces at the Mason Studio. This Austin musician wrote two of the songs while also providing vocals, sitar and acoustic guitar for nimbly connected global music.

Pianist Schumann played Ivan Trevino’s marvelously burbling “Empathy” along with percussionist Burritt, who moved over from the vibraphone to share Schumann’s piano keyboard to tie up the piece. Then she backed tonally flawless soprano Sonja Dutoit Tengblad for a song that employed tender text by poet Emily Dickinson.

Now, if you’ve never experienced the Miró Quartet, live or recorded, you have missed an Austin miracle. The tightly knit chamber group, the pride of the University of Texas, briskly glided through the “Alla Danza Tedesca” movement from Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 13.

Choral leader Johnson is particularly adept at arranging pop or rock songs into something closely suited to his singers. For instance, soloist Kathlene Ritch fronted Conspirare for a gorgeously staged version of Annie Lennox’s “1000 Beautiful Things.” You know, few singers can squeeze more emotion from a song than Lennox, yet Ritch pulled out subtle new feelings from the words and music.

I’ll admit that some of the interstitial patter from the Austin musical visionaries leaned heavily on the gooey side. Pay closer attention to the glorious purity of the music and the cause.

‘The Power of Friendship: Winter Storm Benefit Concert’

Produced by KMFA 89.5, Austin Chamber Music Center, Austin Classical Guitar and Conspirare.