ECMS Summer Music Festival Mainstage Concert
The Eureka Chamber Music Series presents its first-ever Summer Music Festival from Saturday, July 18th through Sunday, July 26th, featuring world-stage musicians and world premiere compositions by the celebrated American composer Elena Ruehr. Familiar faces will include two Avery Fisher Career Grant winners—the Balourdet Quartet and cellist Sophie Shao—as well as ECMS artistic director and violinist Tom Stone and violist Ethan Filner. Stone and Filner were one-half of the Cypress String Quartet, an early ECMS favorite ensemble. Newcomers include violinist Iris Stone, pianist Amy I-Lin Cheng, and the festival’s composer-in-residence Elena Ruehr.
The festival will feature four Mainstage Concerts and two Concert and Conversation events over nine days. Rarely heard chamber works by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Webern, Schoenberg, and Brahms will contrast with intriguing, contemporary pieces by Elena Ruehr, whose work has been described as “unspeakably gorgeous” by Gramophone magazine. Additionally, there will be two free outdoor “Bach Under the Canopy” concerts, the first at the Sequoia Park Gazebo in Eureka on Sunday, July 19th at 11:00 a.m. and the second at Fieldbrook Winery on Sunday, July 26th, also at 11:00 a.m.
ECMS is offering a Summer Musical Festival Pass that includes admission to all six formal concerts for the discounted price of $180. Individual Mainstage Concert tickets are $40 general and $10 for students. Concert and Conversation tickets are $20 general and $5 for students. Please visit eurekachambermusic.org and follow the “purchase tickets” link. There are no added fees or service charges when ordering tickets online. Tickets will also be available at the door.
The finale of the Summer Music Festival will be presented at The Lutheran Church of Arcata on Sunday, July 26th at 7:30 p.m. The world premiere of Ruehr’s “Four Bird Songs” will be performed by Stone and Shao. Using actual birdsong as the source material, Ruehr composed this four-movement work for the performers and for the Eureka Chamber Music Series. Rounding out the program is the boundary-breaking “String Quartet No. 11, Op. 95,” the last of the “middle quartets” by Ludwig van Beethoven, performed by the Balourdet Quartet. The concert closes with “String Sextet No. 2 in G Major, Op. 36” by Johannes Brahms, composed just five years after his first sextet, which the festival program featured a week earlier. This pairing offers an interesting comparison between the earlier work’s lyricism and the later work’s greater textural complexity and expressiveness.
The Eureka Chamber Music Service was born from a labor of love, started decades ago by Pearl and Bob Micheli, a conservatory trained pianist and voice teacher, and a fine amateur violinist, respectively. The Michelis moved to Eureka in the early nineteen-nineties and began hiring classical musicians to travel to Humboldt County and play concerts for a small but dedicated audience.
Incorporated as a non-profit in 2019, the Eureka Chamber Music Series continues to enrich the cultural landscape of the north coast by bringing world-class musicians to Humboldt County and by ensuring that the mission of ECMS is community supported and sustainable. Public concerts presented in Eureka and Arcata, as well as county-wide educational outreach programs, are funded through the generosity of local businesses, individuals, and foundations, as well as by subscription and individual ticket sales. Local support makes these music programs possible.
DATES/TIMES
- Sunday : 7:30-9:30 p.m.
WHERE
PRICE
- Phone: 707-273-6975
- Email: admin@eurekachambermusic.org
- Web site
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