Pittsfield — Pianist Wu Han, cellist David Finckel, violinist Paul Huang, and violist Paul Neubauer will appear at South Mountain Concert Hall on Sunday, October 8, to perform a program of Beethoven, Saint-Saëns, and Brahms.
If there is a chamber music royalty, then Wu Han and David Finckel must be its monarchs. The two have made it their life’s work to change the way people think about chamber music, and, by all accounts, they are succeeding. They present about 200 concerts, lectures, master classes, and outreach events each season.
During their current contract with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, they will become the organization’s longest-serving artistic directors. And the festival they started in the Silicon Valley, Music@Menlo, has been operating since 2002—with an educational component in the festival’s Chamber Music Institute. During the pandemic, the pair produced over 270 digital events to help sustain chamber music communities around the world. For students, their website is a treasure trove of free learning resources pertaining to both music study and careers, as well as detailed advice for anyone presenting concerts. Plus, David offers free cello lessons on YouTube.
Most of what you need to know about violinist Paul Huang can be picked up from a quick look at this video of him performing Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 4 with the Chamber Orchestra Vienna-Berlin. He plays with all the ease and authority one would expect if the violinist were Mozart himself. These are the kind of chops that earned Huang a 2015 Avery Fisher Career Grant and a 2017 Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists. In January 2023, Huang launched the Paul Huang & Friends International Chamber Music Festival in Taipei, Taiwan. His debut album, featuring sonatas by Respighi and Saint-Saëns comes out this month on the French label Naïve Records.
The New York Philharmonic hired Paul Neubauer as the orchestra’s principal violist when he was 21 years old. Affiliated with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (CMS) since 1989, Neubauer has performed as soloist with over 100 orchestras, including the New York, Los Angeles, and Helsinki philharmonics; National, St. Louis, Detroit, Dallas, San Francisco, and Bournemouth symphonies; and Santa Cecilia, English Chamber, and Beethovenhalle orchestras. In 1983, Neubauer earned his master’s degree from Juilliard, where he now teaches. In 1989, Neubauer was the first violist to receive an Avery Fisher Career Grant. Neubauer gave the U.S. Premiere of the newly discovered “Impromptu” for viola and piano by Dmitri Shostakovich, accompanied by pianist Wu Han.
Here is the program for Sunday:
- Beethoven – Violin Sonata No. 8 in G Major, Op. 30, No. 3
- Saint-Saëns – Piano Trio No. 1 in F Major, Op. 18
- Brahms – Piano Quartet No 2 in A Major, Op. 26
Hear Wu Han and Friends—pianist Wu Han, cellist David Finckel, violinist Paul Huang, and violist Paul Neubauer—perform a program of Beethoven, Saint-Saëns, and Brahms at South Mountain Concert Hall, Pittsfield, on Sunday, October 8, at 3 p.m. Ticket information is available here or by calling (413) 442-2106.
