Silver Medal Winners Elm City Ensemble To Perform In Newtown Sunday

When music lovers attend the October 10 concert by The Elm City Ensemble at Edmond Town Hall — the opening concert for the Newtown Friends of Music 1999-2000 season — they will be in for an audio treat. Just how often does one get to hear an ensemble that has just returned triumphantly from an international competition with silver medals around the necks of all the performers?

Eight hundred musicians (or groups of musicians) from 27 countries sent their best demo tapes to the judges of the Third International Chamber Music Competition in Osaka, Japan. From this number, the judges selected 24 groups and invited them, all expenses paid, to travel to Osaka and perform in person.

The late Yehudi Menuhin envisioned the Osaka competition as “the competition of his dreams,” with the ideal notion “that all types of ensembles are judged primarily by how much they emotionally move the audience.”  The Elm City Ensemble, from New Haven (hence its name), is the only American group to ever win at any level of the medal round.

The Elm City Ensemble’s success started in 1997, after winning the first and grand prizes in four national chamber music competitions: the prestigious Fischoff, the Coleman-Barstow, the Yellow Springs Competition, and the AT&T Pro Youth Award in the Carmel Competition.

Formed in 1995 at Yale University, the members are graduates of Juilliard, Eastman and the Mozarteum in Salzburg. The group is comprised of violinist Ingrid Sweeney, clarinetist Garrick Zoeter, pianist Christian Valdes, and cellist Rebecca Patterson.

Since its initial success, The Elm City Ensemble has dedicated itself to the exposure and promotion of contemporary and unusual works. The group currently maintains a versatile repertoire, featuring works from the 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries, although the ensemble is dedicated in particular to commissioning and performing new works.

They have just finished a CD called Scenes From an Imagined Life, which features a world premiere work written for them by the distinguished composer Ezra Lederman. Other works on the CD include Paul Hindemith’s Quartet (1938), and David Schiff’s Divertimento from Gimpel the Fool (1985), which is based on klezmer style of music.

For the performance in Newtown, sponsored by the Newtown Friends of Music, the ensemble will perform not only the Hindemith quartet and the Schiff divertimento, but also Schumann’s Fairytales, which calls for a viola (Ingrid Sweeney plays both instruments), and Mozart’s Kegelstatt Trio. The program will also include another special treat: a performance of Franz Schubert’s beautiful song for soprano, clarinet, and piano, “The Shepherd on the Rock.”

The Schubert work will be performed with guest artist Sarah Wolfson, a recent graduate of Juilliard who is now working on her masters degree. She has sung with such well-known voice teachers as Marilyn Horne, Barbara Cook, Helen and Klaus Donath, and has performed in New York, Washington, DC, and Salzburg, Austria.

Every two years the Connecticut Commission on the Arts (CCA) selects artists from among a pool of in-state and provides the chosen candidates with ongoing continuing education opportunities and an opportunity to apply for grants to help underwrite the cost of presenting these Connecticut artists. Newtown Friends of Music has been able to obtain a grant from CCA to defray some of the cost of bringing The Elm City Ensemble and Ms Wolfson to Newtown.

The opening concert of the 1999-2000 season, the 22nd for the Newtown Friends of Music, will take place on Sunday, October 10, at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. Concerts are performed in the auditorium of Edmond Town Hall, 45 Main Street in Newtown, followed by an informal lobby reception with the performers.

Tickets for concerts presented by NFoM are by subscription, at $45 for all five concerts for adults; $35 for seniors; and free for children between the ages of five and 14 when accompanied by a ticket- holding adult. On the day of the concert, tickets are available at the Edmond Town Hall box office beginning one hour before performance time at $14 for adults and $12 for seniors.

For early reservations and for more information regarding The Elm City Ensemble performance this weekend, contact NFoM president Ellen Parrella at 426-6470.