Chameleon Arts Ensemble founder and artistic director Deborah Boldin. “I can almost hear it in my head before it happens, what textures go together.” Matt Wan photography
The Chameleon Arts Ensemble has always been different.
The Chameleons have blended the unexplored with the familiar since they began giving concerts in 1998. The ensemble’s most recent program—a Brahms trio, among the most familiar, along with settings from Birtwistle, Kodaly and Coleridge-Taylor—is an on-point example of Chameleon’s aesthetic.
Founder and artistic director Deborah Boldin sums it up: “All our programs have something contemporary, something off-the-beaten path, and a standard. In that blueprint there’s always variety.
“It’s the combination that makes it,” she says. “I can almost hear it in my head before it happens, what textures go together. The more variety, the more perspectives we have. And it informs the way we hear the classics. You hear them differently.”
Her approach has built a unique audience. While most concertgoers flee after performances in a rush to get home, the Chameleon crowd hangs out, talks about the music, offers friendship and criticism.
“When it becomes safe again, we are all going to appreciate that experience even more,” Boldin says. “The joy will be amplified. And maybe every audience will stick around more. Chameleon audiences always do that.”
Boldin reacted to the pandemic shutdown cautiously. The Chameleons—a loose-knit group of almost two dozen musicians, versatile enough for Boldin to program almost any chamber repertory—are scattered: “New York, DC, Minnesota, San Francisco, Ohio, Korea—all over the place,” she says. So she created a Chameleon@Home series to get the group through the spring and summer months.
“I wanted to stay connected from my house in Jamaica Plain,” she says. “We made the decision that we would not do livestreams, in part to avert some of the tech woes. Also I found that livestream could be the most stressful and heartbreaking experience.”
That sequence of @Home concerts got the Chameleons through the summer months. “It was a way to keep modest employment going, and give our audience a taste of what the Chameleons were doing. We learned a lot and it set us up for the fall.”
An outdoor program in October, hosted by Duxbury’s Art Complex Museum, was built around John Luther Adams’s pastoral “songbirdsongs.” Other fall programs were recorded safely at Boston’s Goethe-Institut—a longtime subscription series home for the Chameleons.
“It’s a gift to be able to keep Chameleon going, for me and for my colleagues,” Boldin says. “It has been a physical and emotional drain. I have every belief we’re going to come out of this whole, and we’re working to make that true.
“You can’t force it to be different than it is,” she says. “We’re looking forward to getting back with Chameleon’s audience. We feel them every step of the way. It’s what helps me keep going.”
Chameleon Arts Ensemble will survive. The musicians fend for themselves—as always. The audience will return. Boldin’s relationship with the Goethe-Institut provides a foundation—“their friendship has been a huge gift,” she says. Her goals for a safe return sound simple, but heartening as well.
“I’m not trying to grab as much of an audience as possible,” she says. “Chamber music is intimate, an intimate grouping. I just want to do great work, to provide employment for musicians and imaginative programs for people.
“For us, the folks watching our streams would normally come to our concerts. We’re a tiny organization, only a certain bandwidth. We’re not reaching a vast international audience. So those streaming experiences are going to feel even more relevant when concerts start again.”
Keith Powers covers music and the arts for Gannett New England, Opera News and Leonore Overture. Follow @PowersKeith; email to keithmichaelpowers@gmail.com.