Chamber music inspiring 30,000 people in Portland

Chamber Music Northwest is thrilled to introduce the launch of our Young Artists Institute in June, 2022. The Institute is the brainchild of Artistic Directors Gloria Chien and Soovin Kim, who have long wanted to create a unique music training program for young musicians who intend to pursue a career as a performing artist.

What separates the Young Artists Institute from the other excellent music camps in this country is that it offers young musicians the opportunity to explore their possible future as both a solo performing artist and as a member of a chamber ensemble. Students will receive private lessons, coaching and numerous performance opportunities both as soloists and as part of a string quartet.

How it Works:

Sixteen students, ages 14-18, who play violin, viola or cello, will participate in this intensive three-week training program. Housed at the University of Portland, they will spend the first week working closely on solo literature for their instrument with their mentor/instructor. The students will then be grouped into four string quartets, and will receive coaching on ensemble playing as they learn quartet literature and how to play together as a group.

The students being their training with the Institute one week prior to the opening of Chamber Music Northwest’s 2022 Summer Festival. In weeks two and three, students will continue their private lessons, ensemble coaching, and have many opportunities to observe and participate in the chamber music festival: they will attend rehearsals and concerts, play in “prelude” performances prior to the Festival concerts, work with our festival artists, who include some of the top music educators in the field, and have the opportunity to observe and really get a feel for what it is like to be an artist in a world-class chamber music festival.

In addition, the Young Artists will also be featured in multiple community performances, both as soloists and in quartets. They will perform in venues throughout the Portland metropolitan area, working with our education and community network, which includes hospitals, centers for homeless teens, assisted living centers, memory care facilities, community centers, schools, student music camps, and more. In addition, Chamber Music Northwest will utilize a new portable stage that is currently being built for our use to facilitate pop-up concerts. The stage, which is large enough to accommodate a piano, will be easy to tow and set up in virtually any location.

The Institute has engaged four outstanding faculty members from prestigious music institutions around the country:

• Jessica Lee, violin: Assistant Concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra and on faculty at the Cleveland Institute.
• Soovin Kim, violin: Artistic Director of Chamber Music Northwest and Lake Champlain Music Festival, former member of Johannes Quartet for 20 years; on faculty at New England Conservatory.
• Nicholas Cords, viola: Brooklyn Rider String Quartet, former Artistic Director of the Silk Road Ensemble, on faculty at New England Conservatory.
• Peter Stumpf, cello: Professor, University of Indiana and former Principal Cello of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Students will have the opportunity to get to know and perform before the Institute faculty as well as other Festival musicians—a priceless opportunity to make contacts at institutions where they may be applying in the future.

The 16 students, selected by Artistic Directors Soovin Kim and Gloria Chien, will all receive full scholarships, paying only their transportation costs to and from Portland. We anticipate that approximately 50% will come from the Pacific Northwest region; the rest from around the country.

The cost of the Young Artists Institute is $130,000 per year. Chamber Music Northwest is currently raising funds to underwrite scholarships ($8,000 per student) and is creating an endowment fund as a permanent source of funding for this ongoing program. We invite donations of any size to support the Young Artists Institute or other Chamber Music Northwest Education and Community Engagement programs.

Links:

• CMNW Education & Community Engagement Programs

Chamber Music Northwest was among the first performing arts organizations in the country to present live performances since COVID shut down all activity in spring of 2020. Looking back, we were incredibly lucky to schedule our four-week summer festival during that brief window when restrictions were relaxed, and before the threat of the Delta variant was realized. But we were also very careful: the audience was masked while indoors; artists and festival staff had to supply proof of vaccination; we seated only a fraction of capacity so that patrons could be socially distanced. We followed or exceeded all measures to protect our artists, audience and staff—and it paid off. Eight weeks and fifteen performances later, not a single case of exposure to COVID was reported.

Knowing that many of our audience members were not yet ready to return to the concert hall, we recorded each concert, and produced edited concert programs that we shared online for a full month following the festival. And while the numbers were lower than 2020, when we were one of the only organizations providing music online, between our live concert audience (5,076), our streaming audience (3,965) and 6,657 participants (live plus online views) of our education programs (Musical Conversations, master classes, open rehearsals).

Based on the positive reception to our “hybrid” model of presenting both live and online concerts last summer, CMNW plans to continue to record and present “At-Home” (online) concerts this season. Our 2021-22 season opened in October, and will present a total of eight concerts (12 performances). Five of the eight concerts will be recorded, edited and produced as high-quality programs, available to “At-Home” subscribers for a one-week period, beginning two weeks after the live concert date.

2021-22 SEASON CONCERTS

October 10, 2021        Protégé Premiere

Zlatomir Fung, cello and Benjamin Hochman, piano

November 18, 2021    Transcendent Horn Trios

Radovan Vlatkovic, horn; Soovin Kim, violin; Gloria Chien, piano

December 3-4, 2021   A Tribute to Stravinsky

                                    Brentano String Quartet

February 10, 2022       Bach’s Journey of Wonder

                                    Jeremy Denk, piano

February 24, 2022       Poetry in Performance

                                    Christoph Prégardien, tenor and Gloria Chien, piano

March 17-19, 2022     NINETEEN-TWENTY

                                    Akropolis Reed Quintet and BodyVox

April 3, 2022               Rendezvous with Benny

                                    David Shifrin, clarinet and Miró String Quartet

April 28, 2022             We Cannot Walk Alone

                                    Imani Winds

In addition to these exceptional concerts, Chamber Music Northwest is launching a “Musical Explorers Club” for audience members who want to dig deeper into the programming; learn more about the stories behind the works to be performed at an upcoming concert, study why the works were programmed together, and have a chance to ask music-related questions of our presenters. The pilot gathering was led by Artistic Director Soovin Kim in October; we are currently working on the plans and presenters for future meetings.

Under new leadership, our Education and Community Engagement program plans are in high gear! The Brentano String Quartet are this year’s Artists-in-Residence, and will devote a full week in December to residency activities in the community. In the spring, the violin/piano duo of Rebecca Anderson and Mika Sasaki will offer in-person residencies in the schools, and plans for a very exciting new music education program beginning in summer 2022 are taking shape. More details in our next progress report!

Links:

• Chamber Music Northwest's 2021-22 Season
• Chamber Music Northwest At-Home series
• Master classes to watch online

• Garden concert, summer 2021 (PDF)