What to Hear Next Season: Chamber Music

See my preview of the new season of chamber music at Washingtonian.com:

Chamber Music in Washington: 2011-12 Season Preview (Washingtonian, June 29):

Xenakis, String Quartets, JACK Quartet (2009)

Washington has all the best ingredients for chamber music lovers: a range of appropriately sized venues with excellent, intimate acoustics, and a number of concert presenters that host performances by some of the world’s best musicians. In fact, there are really too many concerts for one person to hear, let alone afford. Of the concerts announced so far for next season, which are the best? We’ve laid out our top picks below. (To help reduce the vast number of choices, this post doesn’t even take into account the free concerts on offer. We’ll deal with those in a later entry.)

String Quartets
The Fortas Chamber Music series presents concerts in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater, a venue where there are no bad seats either for eyes or ears. Foursomes that should be worth hearing next season include the Tokyo Quartet (October 26) and the superlative Takács Quartet (March 13). Depending on how you feel about a trip to Rockville, the Jewish Community Center of Greater Washington hosts a surprisingly good concert series in its small auditorium: We’d like to hear the Daedalus Quartet, the winner of the 2001 Banff Competition for string quartets (September 25). The JACK Quartet, one of the cutting-edge quartets in the world at the moment, will play an all-modern program including one of the Ives quartets in the Strathmore Mansion (November 5), part of the Post-Classical Ensemble’s wide-ranging Ives Project. [Continue reading]

What Else to Hear Next Season
Washington Performing Arts Society | Opera | National Symphony Orchestra
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra | Vocal Music