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2024 Capitol Hill Chamber Music Festival
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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.
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.
~ updated August 15,
2024 ~
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SSEMF
banner: detail from "Indeterminate
Landscape" by James C.
Holl.
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