Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival Presents: Festival Concert I

Music past and future: This September marks the Charlottesville Chamber Music’s 25th season and renowned musicians from around the country and abroad will celebrate with concerts from Sept. 8 to 19, 2024, including four concerts this week at The Paramount!

Performances will explore three centuries of influence of one of the composers who launched the chamber music tradition, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), reimagining his work, connecting it to a wide range of other works, and looking into the future. There will be Strads, there will be machines, there will be lights!

Bach’s genius and inventiveness are a guiding spirit of this year’s Festival. That theme of “invention” is especially on display in the first two concerts at The Paramount, on September 8 and 9.

In this concert, renowned French-American jazz/classical pianist & composer Dan Tepfer plays his innovative multimedia composition, Natural Machines. As he improvises on the Yamaha Disklavier, a cutting-edge acoustic player piano, programs he has written on his computer interact with him musically in real-time, as well as colorfully on The Paramount’s large screen.

The concert opens with cellist Raphael Bell, the Festival’s Co-artistic Director, playing Bach’s solo Cello Suite No. 1, followed by short modern pieces that pay homage to Bach and composers influenced by him. Then the Grammy Award-winning quartet Brooklyn Rider will perform pieces from one of Bach’s final creations, the mystical Art of Fugue.