Portland Chamber Music Festival Returns With In-Person Performances

Melissa Reardon, artistic director of the Portland Chamber Music Festival, said the return to live performance has been nourishing for body and soul. “I compare it to drinking a glass of water after you’ve been dried up. It’s rewarding and enriching to play music again, ”she said.

Reardon, who lives in New York City, performed earlier this summer at Kneisel Hall in Blue Hill and at a festival in the other Portland, Oregon, and will be back in Maine soon. With Reardon at the helm, the Portland Chamber Music Festival returns with a truncated in-person concert schedule after performing virtually last year due to the pandemic.

The festival begins with a 5 p.m. benefit concert on Sunday August 15 at Cove Street Arts that features Reardon and Jennifer Elowitch, the festival’s founding director, performing together on viola and violin, with the harp duo and guitar by Bridget Kibbey and João Luiz.

The festival moves to Hannaford Hall on the University of South Maine Portland campus for concerts at 7:30 p.m. on August 19 and 21. The theme of the August 19 program is “Homecoming”, with celebratory and commemorative music by Indo-American composer Reena Esmail, French composer Guillaume Connesson and others. The August 21 program is built around the idea of ​​“Revelations”, with program details to be shared once the music is played.

Keeping the schedule a secret to those attending the concert is not about deceiving or creating a guessing game, but about encouraging the audience to simply listen without prejudice and reflect in the moment, she said. Some music will be familiar to you, others you may not. “Revelations” is a celebration of being together and sharing music in real time, Reardon said.

“This communication that you can have with your audience, this feeling of sharing music in a space with other people, is unlike anything else,” she said. “We didn’t fully appreciate this energy until we lost it. People talk about how we try to recreate this energy in some way or another when we make a recording, which we imagine we are communicating through the microphone. But this palpable shared space with other human beings, there is no substitute for it. This experience of transmitting music in real time – it’s fleeting and then it’s gone, the music is no longer there for a moment and it passes – deserves to be celebrated.

Other musicians performing this year are violinists Tai Murray and Hao Zhou, cellist Raman Ramakrishnan, flutist Alex Sopp and clarinetist Todd Palmer.

At his previous festivals this summer, Reardon said the musicians, who were all vaccinated, formed a bubble between themselves and their families and performed in front of a masked audience. They’ll take the same approach in Portland, with a small, inner circle of musicians and their families, and plenty of room for masked audience members to comfortably stretch out at Hannaford Hall.

It’s going to be fun, she said. Among his musician friends, everyone talks about the way they play with a heightened sense of excitement and thrill “and with a full heart and a quality of giving.” People are playing with so much conviction and so much fire. They really want to communicate with the public again.

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