Close Encounters With Music Chamber Series Expands to The Clark

Program Highlights Russian Piano-Cello Duets by Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, and Tchaikovsky

Pianist Vassily Primakov

Pianist Vassily Primakov

(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass.) – The dynamic Close Encounters with Music chamber series makes its debut appearance at the Clark with “White Nights,” a program of works by Russian composers Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, and Tchaikovsky performed by pianist Vassily Primakov and cellist Yehuda Hanani, who is also artistic director of Close Encounters, on Sunday, July 14, 2013, at 3 pm.

The epic cello/piano sonatas of Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev reflect the same aspects of character as seen in great Russian literature — melancholy, mysticism, whimsy, biting humor, and torrential Romanticism — as well as the added richness of Western influence from their sojourns in Paris and New York. Tchaikovsky’s Seasons for solo piano offers the composer’s signature charm, power, grandeur, and melody that produced his Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty. The program provides a sweeping view of late Russian Romanticism and Modernism through the prism of three pillars of the repertoire.

Close Encounters With Music Founder and Artistic Director Yehuda Hanani

Cellist Yehuda Hanani

“We are delighted to be part of the expansion and new vision of the Clark,” says artistic director Yehuda Hanani. “It is bound to spark new revelations about the synchronicities between the bow and the brush.”

Based in Great Barrington and in 22nd year in the Berkshires, Close Encounters has enjoyed collaborations with museums across the country, including the Detroit Institute of Art, the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, the Phoenix Art Museum, the Center for Fine Arts in Miami, and The Frick Collection in New York. Often centering programs around an art movement, or commonalities between the visual and the acoustic, CEWM’s thematic programming brings a heightened sense of discovery to the concert experience.

Since the inception of its Commissioning Project in 2001, CEWM has worked with the most distinguished composers of our time — Paul Schoenfield, Osvaldo Golijov, Lera Auerbach, Kenji Bunch, and John Musto, among others — to create important new works that have already taken their place in the chamber music canon and on CD. A core of brilliant performers includes pianists James Tocco, Adam Neiman, Walter Ponce, and Jeffrey Swann; violinists Shmuel Ashkenasi, Yehonatan Berick, and Vadim Gluzman; harpsichordist Lionel Party; clarinetists Alexander Fiterstein and Charles Neidich; vocalists Dawn Upshaw, Amy Burton, Jennifer Aylmer, Robert White, Lucille Beer, and William Sharp; quartets Vermeer, Amernet, Manhattan, Avalon, Hugo Wolf, and Cuarteto Latinoamericano; and guitarist Eliot Fisk. Choreographer David Parsons and actors Richard Chamberlain, Jane Alexander, and Sigourney Weaver have also appeared as guests, weaving narration and dance into the fabric of the programs.

Tickets are $40 ($30 members). Visit the Clark or call 413 458 0524 for information or to order tickets.

 

 

 

 

 

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