The Virginia Chamber Music Foundation Presents: Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival Concert I

Ticket go on sale to the general public on Wednesday, July 24 at 10:00AM.

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.

“When musician Dan Tepfer was a kid, he taught himself to code on an early Macintosh computer that his dad brought home one day. That little kid grew up to be a world-renowned jazz pianist. And now, he has programmed another machine: his piano. For the past five years, Tepfer has been writing algorithms that direct a specially modified Yamaha piano to play along with him. Amazing — a duet with phantom hands.” —NPR All Things Considered

J.S. Bach                       Suite No. 1 in G Major, BWV1007
Alfred Schnittke          Prelude in Memoriam Dmitri Shostakovich
Sofia Gubaidulina       Reflections on the Theme B-A-C-H
J.S. Bach                       The Art of Fugue, BWV1080, selections
Dan Tepfer                   Natural Machine

Brooklyn Rider: Colin Jacobsen and Johnny Gandelsman, violin; Nicholas Cords, viola; Michael Nicholas, cello; Timothy Summers, violin; Raphael Bell, cello; Dan Tepfer, Disklavier

Sponsored by The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation

Other 2024 Festival concerts at the Paramount include ticketed events on Monday, September 9 at 7:30PM; Thursday, September 12 at 7:30PM; and a FREE lunchtime concert open to the public on Friday, September 13 at 12:30PM.

For the full Festival calendar, including events at other venues, go to www.cvillechambermusic.org.

KNOW BEFORE YOU GO! The Paramount Theater is pleased to bring diverse programming to the stage and screen. The Theater does not provide advisories about subject matter for events, as sensitivities vary. Not all events may appeal to, or be appropriate for, every person. Patrons are encouraged to familiarize themselves with the shows offered in order to make informed decisions prior to purchasing tickets.