2024 Capitol Hill Chamber Music Festival
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2024 Capitol Hill Chamber Music Festival
~ Period Instrument chamber music from six centuries ~

VANCOUVER CLASSICAL MUSIC (vanclassicalmusic.com, Vancouver BC)  •  January 2015
     "A Lovely Baroque Divertissement from Brotherton, Cohan and Stubbs"
         "A remarkably intimate and refreshing experience. • There was joy and love aplenty here, quite irresistible in its sense of innocence and spontaneity. • ...let me acknowledge, first off, just how well the underpinning of Cohan and Stubbs brought out the variety and motion of this work. • Jeffrey Cohan has such quickness and dynamic range, such a keen control of accents, and such mastery at floating the soft limpid phrase that the combination with Stephen Stubbs’ own brand of structural solidity and insight gave us something pretty special indeed."
    — Geoffrey Newman, VANCOUVER CLASSICAL MUSIC   • 
      http://www.vanclassicalmusic.com/a-lovely-baroque-divertissement-from-brotherton-cohan-and-stubbs


WASHINGTON POST REVIEWS

    "A brilliant performance ... eloquently played ... close to the essence of chamber music." [J. Reilly Lewis, John Moran and Jeffrey Cohan]

    — Joseph McLellan, The Washington Post, June 26, 2000

    "A virtuoso at conveying myriad colors" ... "The audience clearly was entranced ... flutist Jeffrey Cohan captivated young and old.”

    — Cecelia Porter, The Washington Post, July 14, 2001

Chamber Music In the Key of We
   "Baroque flutist Jeffrey Cohan and harpsichordist George Shangrow give new meaning to the intimacy implicit in the genre of chamber music... They have forged not only an exquisitely subtle collaboration but also a common scholarly interpretation of how Bach would have had the music performed.
    "They responded intuitively to each other's rhythmic elasticity and echoed each other's elaborate ornamentations with what sounded like spontaneous inspiration... Almost as impressive was the silent attentiveness that their musicmaking commanded.
    "Bach may have been composing for a soft instrument with a very limited dynamic range, but the music he produced was exuberant, joyous and lyrical. It was these qualities that Cohan and Shangrow communicated..."

    — Joan Reinthaler, The Washington Post, July 16, 2002

Jeffrey Cohan, George Shangrow
   "Though an arcing Romanesque sanctuary and an antebellum exterior might seem to make strange bedfellows, they're a perfect match for St. Mark's Episcopal Church on Capitol Hill and for musicmaking. This week flutist Jeffrey Cohan is showing how beautifully all these elements mesh in the fifth Capitol Hill Chamber Music Festival. He starred Saturday on a slender, mellow-toned baroque flute, along with George Shangrow on a two-manual (double-keyboard) harpsichord built by David Rubio in 1972.
   "You might wonder how a concert made up of Handel sonatas written nearly three centuries ago -- and designed for two apparently mild-mannered instruments -- might rivet an audience's attention for an entire evening. But Saturday it worked gloriously. Superb playing outlined Handel's bizarre melodic turns and jarring harmonies, reproducing the dramatic impact of opera arias by a composer who, above all, wrote for the theater and whose characters erupted onstage with steely, single-minded emotional force.
   "Cohan transformed Handel's often bare, skeletal melodies, with improvisations unwinding in fancifully embellished peregrinations -- all mellow-toned, yet exhorting a "message" in character portrayals with the dogged exuberance of a political candidate. Shangrow's harpsichord echoed the flute's ornaments with gusto. Ideally balanced, the performers fueled the music's gripping metrical drive, escaping into rhythmic elasticity for momentary expressive asides."

    —
Cecelia Porter, The Washington Post, August 2, 2004

Chamber Music Festival's Sounds of Slovenia
 - Modern Composers Get a Hearing on the Hill
    "Jeffrey Cohan has made Slovenian music a focal point of this year's Capitol Hill Chamber Music Festival. The Capitol Hill Chamber Music Festival got off to an exhilarating start Wednesday night at St. Mark's Church. Marking the festival's sixth year, artistic director and flutist Jeffrey Cohan assembled a trio of concerts that brought to public attention some largely unknown works -- including two world premieres -- by active composers from Slovenia. From piece to piece, Cohan's artistry was evident as he breathed life into his instrument, seeming to find no limit to its sonic possibilities, ways of articulating phrases and modes of expressing composers' personal styles -- as in Brina Jez's beautifully moody "Three Little Pieces." Chappell gave a brilliant account of Kopac's Preludes for solo piano, and Cain's sweetness of timbre and vocal power suited compositions by Brina Jez and Kopac."
    — Cecelia Porter, The Washington Post, August 5, 2005

 For Frederick the Great, a Concert of the Same Quality
    The second of two concerts in this year’s Capitol Hill Chamber Music Festival, held at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church Sunday night, was devoted to music from the Prussian court of Frederick the Great. The theme is a timely one since Germany celebrates this year the 300th birthday of the Prussian king who, besides being a brilliant military strategist, was also a passionate musician. Fittingly, the festival’s artistic director, Jeffrey Cohan, played a baroque flute that is a replica of an instrument made for Frederick by his teacher, Johann Joachim Quantz, now in the collections of the Library of Congress.
    Cohan is a wonderful player who exploits all the richly expressive potential of the baroque wooden flute with ease and subtlety. With his partners, harpsichordist Joseph Gascho and cellist Gozde Yasar, Cohan played sonatas by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Georg Benda and Quantz — all musicians employed by Frederick’s at his Potsdam palace, Sanssouci — as well as a sonata by the monarch himself.
    Late in his life, Johann Sebastian Bach visited Emanuel, the most famous of his several composer sons, in Potsdam. “Old Bach” was given a warm welcome at court, and Frederick asked Bach if he could improvise on a theme he had composed. Bach complied, evidently to the king’s satisfaction. But later, Bach used Frederick’s theme as the basis for one of his late masterpieces, “The Musical Offering.” Selections from this sublime work, along with a Bach violin sonata adapted for flute, were the culmination of a thoughtfully conceived and most enjoyable evening.

    — Patrick Rucker, The Washington Post


At St. Mark's, Good Things Come in Trios
    "It's probably fanciful imagining a large audience turning up to hear obscure chamber music at the height of summer vacation season. But the mere 29 heads I counted at St. Mark's Episcopal Church for Tuesday's Capitol Hill Chamber Music Festival recital seemed an especially pathetic showing for such a stylishly played evening. St. Mark's, one of Washington's more strikingly beautiful and acoustically friendly churches, added just the right bloom to the gentle buzz of the festival's period instruments. Tuesday's program -- commemorating the 200th anniversary of the deaths of Haydn and his little-known contemporary, Carl Wilhelm Glösch, and the 250th birthday of François Devienne -- was predictable for a festival whose artistic director, Jeffrey Cohan, is a specialist in baroque and classical flute: All five pieces played were 18th-century trios for flute, violin and cello. If such flute, flute and more flute programming produced an inevitable sameness of tone, these lesser trios by the great Haydn, and great trios by the lesser Glösch, Devienne and their contemporary Franz Anton Hoffmeister met in a middle ground of high competence (the dark-hued Devienne D Minor Trio marginally more memorable than the other scores), and all were played with lived-in ease and affection."

    —
Joe Banno
, The Washington Post, July 2, 2009


The Capitol Hill Chamber Music Festival has since 2000 presented chamber music by familiar as well as little-known composers from the Renaissance through the present on Capitol Hill in period instrument performances which shed new light upon early performance practice and occasionally contemporary by Slovenian and other composers. Many unpublished works from the Library of Congress have have received their modern day premieres during these concerts.
Early Music Ameriica
The Capitol Hill Chamber Music Festival is a nonprofit corporation in the District of Columbia and is proud to be an affiliate organization of Early Music America, which develops, strengthens, and celebrates early music and historically informed performance in North America.


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~ updated August 15, 2024 ~
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