Photo by Robert Salerno
|
Photo by Carol Kuller
|
The West Stockbridge Chamber Players’ Winter Concert:
A celebration featuring three composers with ties to the Berkshires
By Liza Bennett
On the last Monday of 2021, the Congregational Church in West Stockbridge opened its doors to an eager (masked and fully vaccinated) crowd for the West Stockbridge Chamber Players’ Winter Concert. The event had been sold out for over a week. The pandemic had kept the Chamber Players from performing their traditional holiday concert in 2020, so a sense of celebration filled the aisles. Organized by long-time Chamber Player favorites violist Daniel Getz and violinist Sheila Fiekowsky, who were joined by pianist Brett Hodgdon, the program featured the work of three composers with connections to our area.
Fiekowsky introduced the first piece, Aaron Copland’s Sonata for Violin and Piano, saying that she and Hodgdon had thoroughly enjoyed rehearsing the sonata that Virgil Thomson had called one of Copland’s “most satisfying pieces.” Written between 1942 and 1943 when Copland was teaching at the Tanglewood Music Center, the work had an elegiac quality and, in fact, was dedicated to a close friend who had been shot down in the Pacific. Copland was so closely associated with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Serge Koussevitzky that his ashes were scattered over the lawn at Tanglewood.
The Copland piece was followed by Bohuslav Martinů’s Three Madrigals for Violin and Viola, performed by Getz and Fiekowsky, who explained the composer was championed by Koussevitzky and invited to teach at Tanglewood in 1946. Martinů wrote the piece, which was inspired by Mozart’s duos and English madrigals, while recuperating from a near-fatal fall from a balcony at Searles Castle where he was living. Fiekowsky and Getz gave a performance filled with virtuosic panache.
Getz introduced the final offering in the program, Rebecca Clarke’s Sonata for Viola and Piano, which had tied for first place in a competition sponsored by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge at the Berkshire Festival of Chamber Music in 1919. At the time it was said in the press that the idea of a “woman writing such a beautiful work was socially inconceivable.” The sonata that Clarke had called “her little whiff of success” highlighted the depth and range of the viola, which, accompanied by Hodgdon, Getz played with his usual mastery.
Although COVID-19 kept the Historical Society from offering its customary reception, the feeling in the church as the audience slowly departed was one of uplift and shared appreciation for this great gift of the season: the West Stockbridge Chamber Players in concert.
Fiekowsky introduced the first piece, Aaron Copland’s Sonata for Violin and Piano, saying that she and Hodgdon had thoroughly enjoyed rehearsing the sonata that Virgil Thomson had called one of Copland’s “most satisfying pieces.” Written between 1942 and 1943 when Copland was teaching at the Tanglewood Music Center, the work had an elegiac quality and, in fact, was dedicated to a close friend who had been shot down in the Pacific. Copland was so closely associated with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Serge Koussevitzky that his ashes were scattered over the lawn at Tanglewood.
The Copland piece was followed by Bohuslav Martinů’s Three Madrigals for Violin and Viola, performed by Getz and Fiekowsky, who explained the composer was championed by Koussevitzky and invited to teach at Tanglewood in 1946. Martinů wrote the piece, which was inspired by Mozart’s duos and English madrigals, while recuperating from a near-fatal fall from a balcony at Searles Castle where he was living. Fiekowsky and Getz gave a performance filled with virtuosic panache.
Getz introduced the final offering in the program, Rebecca Clarke’s Sonata for Viola and Piano, which had tied for first place in a competition sponsored by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge at the Berkshire Festival of Chamber Music in 1919. At the time it was said in the press that the idea of a “woman writing such a beautiful work was socially inconceivable.” The sonata that Clarke had called “her little whiff of success” highlighted the depth and range of the viola, which, accompanied by Hodgdon, Getz played with his usual mastery.
Although COVID-19 kept the Historical Society from offering its customary reception, the feeling in the church as the audience slowly departed was one of uplift and shared appreciation for this great gift of the season: the West Stockbridge Chamber Players in concert.