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The Commercial Appeal, Memphis, TN, June 15, 2007

Chamber music festival scheduled
Belvedere concert series coming to Grace St. Luke's
By Christopher Blank

The fireworks during Memphis in May's Sunset Symphony might as well be the annual coup de grace to classical music.The explosions cue the stark silence of summer. Who knows why there's practically no orchestral music for three months? Other cities have festivals. Sitka, Alaska (pop. 9,000) has put one on since 1972. Aspen's is huge. Right now, violins are wailing all over Vermont. Maybe it's the heat. Memphis summers could melt a sharp to a flat, that's true. But it's not like the Cannon Center lacks air conditioning. Some would argue that people with the cash for the symphony are spending it on vacation, as if East Memphis ups and leaves town for the whole summer. And that could be true. Except that there are certainly good crowds at the Memphis Botanic Garden's concert series. And, hey, I'm still here. The biggest exodus is among the musicians themselves. When their contracts end with the Memphis Symphony Orchestra in May, many go elsewhere to teach in various summer programs or perform at major festivals. So classical fans have to sit patiently until classical music rises again, phoenix-like, in September. Well, not this summer. Some bad financial luck for a small summer chamber music festival has meant good news for Memphis. Six concerts, more than 30 different compositions, and best of all, it's all totally free. Interested?

The Belvedere Chamber Music Festival is the work of Patricia Gray, president of the Luna Nova Music Ensemble, and a Memphis resident. Since 2002, the festival -- which gave student composers the opportunity to have their works performed and recorded -- had been held in Texas, Florida and Alabama. When the grant money dried up, instead of disbanding the group, Gray decided to bring it to Memphis and make it a private venture. Her church, Grace St. Luke's Episcopal , and the Beethoven Club agreed to host the first concerts here. As in the past, three young composers were selected in a worldwide competition to have their music played. The first place winner, Gianluca Verlingieri, is flying in from Italy at his own expense to hear it. "We like to do new works, but also stuff that has general appeal," Gray said of the music on the programs. "We don't want to frighten people." Most of the composers on the programs are still living. Among the more recognizable works are a piano and bassoon duet by Hindemith, a flute and piano sonata by Prokofiev, and a clarinet and bassoon sonata by Poulenc. Each concert features five or six works, none of them repeated. Three of the concerts are on June 23, making it a marathon day for anyone who wants to keep up. "I don't like really long concerts," said Gray. "Each is about an hour and 15 minutes with no intermissions. The idea is to give people a wide variety of music and then get them out."

-- Christopher Blank: 529-2305

Birmingham News, Sunday, August 27, 2006

Luna Nova perfectly captures genius of an era
MICHAEL HUEBNER News staff writer

Anyone who needed an introduction to late-20th century music would have done well to hear Luna Nova on Friday night. Each of the five composers represented at the trio's concert at Hill Recital Hall easily makes the short list of great music scribes from the 1950s onward, and these nuggets for one, two and three instruments lay at the heart of their respective geniuses.

This music of the imagination transported a small but engaged audience from a warm Alabama night to a vast Japanese landscape to birds in flight to the depths of the ocean.

Toru Takemitsu's "Air for Solo Flute" (1995) is a lonely piece - light, atmospheric, expansive, breathy - composed a year before the composer's death. As rendered by flutist John McMurtery, it whispered, sighed, then exploded, always finding respite in a single pitch.

American composer Elliott Carter's dissonant, agitated yet probing "Enchanted Preludes" (1988) was played with the right amount of tension and repose by McMurtery and cellist Craig Hultgren.

There's little of Chinary Ung's music that escapes his Cambodian roots, and "Khse Buon" (1980) for cello solo falls squarely into his expressive mold, not only for its Khmer folk stylings, but for the sorrow it evokes with its eerie, wistful harmonics. For "Le Merle Noir" (1951), Olivier Messiaen transcribed birdsong and turned it into a piece for flute and piano by slowing it down, harmonizing it and applying a variety of rhythms. McMurtery and pianist Adam Bowles caressed its feathery sounds, then launched into its furious ending with focus and confidence.

The trio ended with a classic from 1971, George Crumb's "Voice of the Whale." Inspired by the gentle, high-pitched whistles and cries whales use to communicate, the work requires all three players to wear masks, the flutist to sing into the instrument while simultaneously playing it, the pianist to pluck and hammer inside the piano and the cellist to retune the instrument. All instructions were precisely followed, although the deep-blue lighting required in the score was missing.

More important, the musicians captured the sonic ambiance beautifully. The work's subtext - variations that progress from the beginning to the end of time - was convincingly done, its final descent to a meditative calm a captivating close.

E-mail: mhuebner@bhamnews.com

Birmingham News, July 29, 2005

The most notable aspect of Wednesday's concert was the manner of performance--technically near perfect, sensitive to style, well-rehearsed, possessing a rare level of confidence. Then there were the pieces themselves--inventive, uniquely engaging, transcendent of the occasional design flaw.