The Dover Quartet opens the Rockport Chamber Music Festival June 9. Standing from left: Joel Link, Camden Shaw and Bryan Lee. Seated is violist Julianne Lee, who makes her first appearance with the ensemble in this concert. Roy Cox photograph
By Keith Powers
Barry Shiffman has gotten good at it.
At creating summer festivals that are filled with talent, unusual in concept, and popular with audiences.
The artistic director of the Rockport Chamber Music Festival has seen chamber music from all sides. He was a founding member of the St. Lawrence String Quartet in the 1980s. A director of chamber music and also competitions at Banff, the historic Canadian music center in Alberta. He’s an associate dean at Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music. And he’s weathered concert planning in Rockport for six years, through the pandemic and into the present.
“There’s a curatorial bent to programming, matchmaking, keeping an ear to the ground,” he says. “We’re blessed with our hall, and reputation. When we make an offer to an artist, it’s pretty compelling.”
This summer’s Rockport Chamber Music Festival begins June 9, with the Dover Quartet coming to the Shalin Liu Performance Center (violinist Ray Chen performs the RCMF gala June 4). Four consecutive weeks that follow feature musicians like Marc-André Hamelin, Livia Sohn, the Isidore, Escher and Balourdet quartets, A Far Cry, 3rd Coast Percussion, Stefan Jackiw, Shai Wosner, Jan Lisiecki and Paul Huang. Gidon Kremer comes to RCMF on August 12, part of the annex concerts later in the season.
It’s a breathtaking mix, and expectations for healthy attendance numbers run high in the organization.
“There’s a lot of stories about the decline of classical music,” Shiffman says, “but success in the performing arts is tied to the explosive growth of the festival market. It’s a story that doesn’t get told enough. When I left the St. Lawrence (in 2006), even then, we could have played every day of the week from Memorial Day to Labor Day.”
Dover Quartet’s appearance adds a milestone to this summer’s lineup, featuring a new member, Julianne Lee, who replaces founding violist Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt. Lee—who until this month was principal second violinist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra—makes her first appearance with the quartet at RCMF (she’s always had a dual career as violist/violinist). The quartet and guests open the festival with music of Haydn, Walker and Mendelssohn (the octet).
The presence of composer-in-residence Mark Applebaum hearkens back to Shiffman’s Stanford University days, where St. Lawrence was a resident quartet. Applebaum has written a new work for harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani and the Escher Quartet (June 18), and sits in on a late-night cabaret June 16.
Composer-in-residence Mark Applebaum. “I think we both opened up windows for each other, into artistic practice,” says RCMF artistic director Barry Shiffman.
“Mark and I met when we were both appointed to Stanford,” Shiffman says. “Everything I love in music, he wasn’t interested in. The stuff he was interested in, I thought was not real. I think we both opened up windows for each other, into artistic practice. And he’s hysterically funny. Some of his chance-based cabarets are hilarious.”
In all, the lineup features performers accustomed to larger halls and audiences. But the willingness of international artists to perform in far-flung destinations and in relatively modest settings seems natural to Shiffman.
“Performing artists crave connection,” he says. “During the year, you play and then hit the road. A festival lets you park for a week, and make connections.
“In the festival market, you see the creation of community—for the audience, and the philanthropic community, and for the artists.”
RCMF artistic director Barry Shiffman: “Success in the performing arts is tied to the explosive growth of the festival market. It’s a story that doesn’t get told enough.”
The Rockport Chamber Music Festival hosts its gala June 4, with violinist Ray Chen. The festival officially opens June 9, and continues for four weekends. Chanticleer makes a festival annex appearance July 25, and violinist Gidon Kremer closes the summer presentations Aug. 12.