The 20th edition of the Montreal Chamber Music Festival will for a second year feature young Israeli artists, as well as famous American klezmer clarinetist David Krakauer. They perform in programming marking the 70th anniversary of the end of the Holocaust.
The festival, under the artistic direction of its founder, Denis Brott, takes place June 6 to 21 at Bourgie Hall of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and McGill University’s Pollack Hall.
The Israel Connection is a five-concert series within the festival showcasing clarinetist Alexander Fiterstein and the Ariel Quartet, made possible with support from the Israeli Consulate General, the Azrieli Foundation and the Sir Jack Lyons Foundation.
In programming the festival’s 20th anniversary, Brott was inspired by the concurrent 70th anniversaries of liberation: the end of World War II and the Holocaust.
“These two earth-shattering moments in time instilled in me the desire to musically express the remarkable power of the human spirit,” he said.
The message of resilience and hope will be conveyed in such diverse works as the Quartet No. 3 by Victor Ullmann, written in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany in 1943, and in the haunting cantorial-style music of the Argentine Oswaldo Golijov’s Prayers of Isaac the Blind.
Brott says, “We will take a musical voyage which will celebrate the extraordinary resilience and sense of survival in our collective spirit.”
For the first concert in The Israel Connection series, on June 10 at Pollack Hall, Montreal-born pianist Marc-André Hamelin shares the stage with the young American Dover Quartet for the festival’s official anniversary celebration.
The program features Ullmann’s rarely heard Quartet No. 3, along with the Piano Quintet in F minor by César Franck.
On June 12 at Pollack Hall, the all-strings Dover Quartet joins Fiterstein for Sounds of the Earth, featuring music by Bartók, Dvoràk and Brahms.
On June 17 at Bourgie Hall is Singing Strings, showcasing the Ariel Quartet. In tribute to Denis’ father, Alexander Brott (1915–2005), a renowned composer, conductor, violinist and teacher, the quartet performs Brott’s Ritual (1942) along with Schubert’s Death and the Maiden.
The quartet will be joined by Toronto Symphony Orchestra concertmaster Jonathan Crow, Brott on cello, and winners of instruments from the Canada Council for the Arts Musical Instrument Bank for an ensemble of over 20 strings.
They will perform Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony in C Minor, as arranged by Gustav Mahler and dedicated to victims of war and fascism.
With The Human Spirit on June 18 at Bourgie Hall, the festival offers two poignant 20th-century chamber works featuring Krakauer, the Ariel Quartet, Brott, Crow and pianist David Jalbert. Golijov’s The Dreams & Prayers of Isaac the Blind refers to a 13th-century mystic who postulated that various configurations of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet account for everything in the universe.
The second half is devoted to Olivier Messiaen’s ethereal Quartet for the End of Time, written while the composer was a captured French soldier and first heard on a cold night in 1941 at a German prisoner-of-war camp.
Then, in one of the final concerts, on June 20 at Bourgie Hall, the festival presents Krakauer’s Acoustic Klezmer Quartet. One of the foremost musicians of the new wave of klezmer, Krakauer tours the globe with his ensemble which “hurls the tradition of klezmer music into the rock era,” according to the New York Times.
For the complete schedule, visit www.festivalmontreal.org.
