Quartet to open Arcady Music Festival

BANGOR – “I never knew that chamber music could be exciting!”

The comment came from a lobsterman who, along with 50 other area businessmen and women, had just listened to a talk about the Arcady Music Festival given by an Arcady volunteer at a Rotary Club dinner.

Over the past two decades, thousands of people, native and “from away,” have come to appreciate chamber music concerts and other performances by this cultural organization.

Arcady will renew its 21-year commitment to its audiences this summer with a series of six weekly concerts by professional musicians from two continents along with gifted student soloists from Maine. The series will commence at 7:30 p.m. Monday at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Bangor and will be held at the same time and location on successive Mondays through Aug. 27.

Mount Desert Island audiences will hear the same six concerts at 8 p.m. Thursdays at Bar Harbor’s Holy Redeemer Church starting July 26. Other communities that will be host to the musical events are Bucksport, Dover-Foxcroft, Skowhegan, Greenville, Belfast and Farmington.

Masanobu Ikemiya, founder and artistic director of the Arcady Music Festival, came to the United States from his native Japan at the age of 10 with his parents. His musical training continued in this country, and by the time he was a young man he already was playing piano and harpsichord recitals in the United States, Japan and Europe. That international background equipped him to develop a global concert concept when he came to Maine and helped found Arcady in 1980.

This year’s series will open in Bangor with Musica Petropolitana, a quartet of a cellist, two violinists and a harpsichordist, all of whom had begun musical studies as very young children in the 1970s and ’80s at the renowned conservatories of St. Petersburg, Russia. The quartet’s specialty is music by Bach, Vivaldi and other Baroque composers on instruments of the same period (about 1600 to 1750), which are tuned about a halftone lower than contemporary instruments. The result is a uniquely mellow sound. Musica Petropolitana won first prize at the prestigious Early Music Competition in Bruges, Belgium, in 1993 and again in 1996.

The second concert of the season will introduce Trio Voronezh, discovered by an American producer while playing Bach in a Frankfurt, Germany, subway station. The group made its U.S. debut at the 1996 Oregon Bach Festival. Vladimir Volochin plays the domra, a three-stringed, short-necked lute that is a predecessor to the balalaika. Sergei Teleschev’s instrument is the banjan, a chromatic-button accordion with various registers, which the musician changes by using his chin. Valeri Petruchin plays the double-bass balalaika, the three-stringed Russian national instrument with a triangular body made of fir, known for its resonant sound.

Arkady Steinlucht will return as guest conductor to lead the Arcady Festival Orchestra in the season’s third event, which will feature two premiere performances. “Three Glances at St. Petersburg” composed by Russian Olga Petrova will receive its American premiere. It will be followed by the world premiere of “Arkadia,” commissioned by the Arcady Music Festival and composed by Greg Hall, 42, who is vice president of the Maine Composers Forum. Hall studied with noted American composer Ned Rorem at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Music by Haydn, Telemann, Gluck, Mozart, Marcello, Vivaldi and Kabalevski will complete the orchestral program.

The fourth concert will feature the Essex String Quartet and the Arcady Youth Orchestra, which had worked together previously at Arcady’s International Music Camp. Student soloists will play the three movements of Mozart’s C-major Piano Concerto, k.246. The Essex String Quartet has been quartet-in-residence at the Juilliard School, Rutgers University, Yale University, the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, the Aspen Festival and the Banff Festival. Pianist Kazuko Hayami will join the Essex quartet in Cesar Franck’s Quintet for Piano and Strings.

Arcady artistic director Ikemiya will be featured at the piano when the season’s fifth program presents members of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra along with “Music from China.” In “China Variation, No. 5 from the ‘I Got Rhythm’ Variations,” Ikemiya arranged George Gershwin’s famous jazz tune for a Chinese ensemble plus violin, viola, cello and piano especially for this concert.

Ikemiya also will perform in the season’s final concert which will spotlight the famous Borromeo String Quartet. He will join the foursome in Dvorak’s Piano Quintet in A major, op. 81. Also programmed are chamber works by Mozart, Debussy, Beethoven and Shostakovich. The Borromeo String Quartet will share the program with the Arcady Youth String Quartet, with Meredith Crawford and Aaron Kuan, violins; Miwa Ikemiya, viola, and Felice Kuan, cello.

Traditional with the Arcady Music Festival is the performance by one or more exceptional music students in this area at each festival concert.

Information on Arcady tickets, prices, concert times and locations is available by calling the Arcady office in Bar Harbor at 207-288-2141 or 288-9500. The website is www.arcady.org.