Great Barrington — In partnership with the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center and Classical WMHT-FM, concert presenter Close Encounters With Music will offer streaming performances Oct. 24, Nov. 15, and Dec. 13, all to be shot at the Mahaiwe, and all at no cost to viewers.
CEWM has by no means lost its mojo during this strange season of cruelly curtailed concert making. Over the summer, the group pulled off an entirely virtual version of its annual Berkshire High Peaks Festival, with 46 students participating remotely from various parts of the globe and an empty Mahaiwe theater serving as the venue for a concluding guitar-cello recital featuring Eliot Fisk and Yehuda Hanani.
Now, for its second act of 2020, CEWM will present three concerts to be streamed on the dates below. Here are their programs:
Saturday, Oct. 24, 2020, 7:30 p.m.
The Escher Quartet
Beethoven, Brahms, Debussy
“Includes the magnificent Brahms String Sextet No. 1, with Daniel Panner, viola and Yehuda Hanani, cello”
stream and program notes here
Sunday, Nov. 15, 2020, 7:30 p.m.
Irina Muresanu, Dov Scheindlin, Mikael Darmanie, Yehuda Hanani
“The French Connection — Saint-SaĂ«ns, Debussy, FaurĂ©, Boulanger — musical portraitists who created some of the best loved classical music of today.”
stream and program notes here
Sunday, Dec. 13, 2020, 7:30 p.m.
Danielle Talamantes, Kerry Wilkerson, Peter Zazofsky, Max Levinson, Yehuda Hanani
“A Night At the Opera! Arias from Italian, French and German operas, in their original as well as transformed to become vehicles for instrumental virtuosity and new delight.”
stream and program notes here
Close Encounters With Music has a long history of engaging the finest musicians. Some of the standouts will appear in these three programs. Information about the individual musicians is available on the internet, mainly on the players’ own websites. Click on their links above and get to know them a little. It will make the performances all the more enjoyable if you are aware, for example, that violist Dov Scheindlin plays for the Met Orchestra, or that Irina Muresanu’s husband is an emergency room physician in Washington, D.C. All of these players have fascinating work histories, typically spanning decades, the details of which enrich our listening experience significantly.
In past years, when CEWM presented performances for live audiences, the option to view these concerts from home would have been highly prized. (People get stuck at home for all kinds of reasons besides pandemics.) Thanks in part to recent advances in streaming technology but mainly in part to its perennial indefatigability, Close Encounters With Music, now in its 29th year, is still killing it.
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Viewers of CEWM’s streaming programs will have the opportunity to make online donations.
