MONTREAL — The renowned Jerusalem Chamber Music Festival will make its Canadian debut in Montreal on May 13 when the ensemble performs at St. James United Church downtown as part of the 13th edition of the Montreal Chamber Music Festival.
“It’s quite a coup,” the festival’s founder and director, Denis Brott, LEFT, told The CJN. “All its artists have very distinguished reputations.”
The Jerusalem Chamber Music Festival was persuaded to make its Canadian premiere at the Montreal festival – which runs May 1 to 24 – as part of a North American tour of only three cities that coincides with Israel’s 60th birthday.
Its appearance locally is taking place just prior to performances in New York and Chicago, and before resuming a tour of Europe.
The evening in Montreal is being sponsored by David Sela, a friend of Brott’s and a benefactor of classical music causes. Besides being active in Jewish community agencies such as the former Jewish Immigrant Aid Services, Sela, a classical music aficionado, has sponsored an important prize at the Montreal Symphony Orchestra’s International Composition Competition.
The Jerusalem ensemble’s tentative program in Montreal includes Schumann’s Six Pieces in Canon Form; Beethoven’s Clarinet Trio; Hungarian-Jewish composer Georgy Kurtag’s Hommage for Clarinet, Piano and Viola; and the Schumann (or Brahms) Piano Quartet.
For Brott, a renowned cellist and chamber musician who spent a decade with the Orford String Quartet, the appearance by the Jerusalem chamber ensemble will add an additional layer of prestige to the Montreal event, which will showcase some 80 artists and include chamber music “in all its forms.”
Artists scheduled to perform include internationally renowned pianists such as Anton Kuerti, Ignat Solzhenitsyn, Ivo Janssen and Simone Dinnerstein; jazz singer Ranee and pianist Oliver Jones; and even hip-hop klezmer artist Josh Dolgin’s group, Socalled, and Solid State Breakdance.
The Jerusalem Chamber Music Festival ensemble was co-founded in 1997 by another internationally renowned pianist, , Elena Bashkirova, the Jerusalem festival’s artistic director and wife of famed pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim; and by Yeheskell Beinish, chair of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, as a way to revitalize secular culture in Jerusalem.
Culture in Jerusalem has been “in danger of extinction,” she told Middle East Focus in an interview last year. “Israel has a lot of things going on, especially in Tel Aviv, but Jerusalem has very little.”
For most of the years since its inception, the Jerusalem Chamber Music Festival has performed out of the famous YMCA building across from the King David Hotel, and its artistic reputation has grown exponentially, recording CDs and travelling from Israel to perform at numerous festivals across Europe and North America.
The performers coming to Montreal include Bashkirova, violinist Michael Barenboim, violist Amihai Grosz, cellist Kyril Zlotnikov and clarinetist Matthias Glander.
After the performance, the Israeli consulate will host a reception in the ensemble’s honour.
“It’s a very good thing that the Jewish community will also be able to welcome this group to Montreal,” Brott said.
More information is available by visiting the Montreal Chamber Music Festival website at www.festivalmontreal.org.