By Alan Sherrod Since its humble beginnings in the backroom of a coffee house, the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra’s Concertmaster Series has evolved organically, continuing to dazzle with small ensemble virtuosity, while also exploring the music’s connections to history and…
Review: Virtuosity and Warm Reflection Highlight January’s Concertmaster Series Concert
By Alan Sherrod If Tchaikovsky’s ballets, symphonies, and operas tell us anything, it is that the composer gravitated to the richness and complexity of orchestral textures as a main vehicle for musical creation. Chamber music seems to have had…
Review in brief: ‘Gabriel Lefkowitz and Friends’ offers a delicious ‘Trout’
Franz Schubert, at his best, gives the listener a feeling of euphoria, an ineffable sensation of joy that falls somewhere between contentment and exhilaration. Schubert’s “Trout Quintet” (Quintet in A Major, D. 667), heard last evening on the Knoxville Symphony…
Recital Report: Brahms Chamber Music with Piano Wraps with 7th Recital
On Monday, Kevin Class wrapped up his seven recital series of the Complete Chamber Music of Brahms with piano. Over the seven recitals, Class was joined by 15 guest musicians and UTSOM faculty members.
Sunday at the Bijou: The Principal Quartet Explores Schubert, Prokofiev, and Brahms
While the growth of Knoxville’s classical music scene has been quietly satisfying for audiences, the growth of chamber music within that scene in the last five or six years has been nothing short of phenomenal. Providing the original foundation for…
This Week: KSO’s Concertmaster Series at the KMA
The Knoxville Symphony Orchestra’s Concertmaster Series of chamber music events, Gabriel Lefkowitz and Friends, opens its 4th season this week on Wednesday and Thursday evenings at the Knoxville Museum of Art. What has made the series so charming are the friendly…
Wed/Thurs: KSO Concertmaster Series Features Dvorák Quintet in G
The last KSO Concertmaster Series concert of the season comes this week to the Knoxville Museum of Art in a program featuring the Dvorák String Quintet in G major, Op. 77 as well as a slew of short virtuosic violin pieces…
Review: KSO Concertmaster Series Shows Off Its New Friends
This week’s installment of the KSO’s Concertmaster Series of chamber music—Gabriel Lefkowitz and Friends—showed off just how important friends are, both onstage and in the audience. One of the works programmed offered the largest ensemble yet for the series—the “Winter” concerto…
Balthus and Beethoven’s Late Quartets
Earlier this fall on the occasion of a performance of Michael Torke’s Bright Blue Music, I wrote a little about synesthesia, a neurological phenomenon in which stimulation in one sensory area leads to an involuntary sensory experience in another area. In…