Gloria Chien, Soovin Kim & David Shifrin: Solos, Duos & Trios
Chamber Music Northwest Artistic Director and “woodwind god” (Portland Mercury) David Shifrin is joined by his soon-to-be successors, pianist Gloria Chien and violinist Soovin Kim, for a powerful program of solo, duo, and trio masterpieces. Enjoy their individual virtuosity as well as their electrifying harmony including a special performance of the klezmer-kissed clarinet trio written for Shifrin by composer Paul Schoenfeld.
This concert has been rescheduled to the date below. If you have tickets, they have automatically been exchanged for the new date. New tickets will be sent two weeks prior to the concert. Please contact our Box Office at 503-294-6400 or .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) with questions or for exchanges, ticket donations, and refunds.
Alberta Rose Theatre
Thursday, 6/4 • 7:30 pm PT
Available through Tuesday, 6/2 • 10:00 pm PT
Program
Click on any piece of music below to learn more about it.
- BRAHMS Sonata No. 2 in E-flat for Clarinet and Piano, Op. 120
Allegro amabile
Allegro appassionato - Sostenuto - Tempo I
Andante con moto - Allegro - Più tranquilloIn 1890, at the age of 57, Johannes Brahms announced his retirement. As he later put it, “I’m really too old. . . I had achieved enough; here I had before me a carefree old age and could enjoy it in peace.”
As it turned out, life had different plans. The following year, Brahms visited Meiningen, a small central-German court where he met a clarinetist named Richard Mühlfeld. Brahms found himself captivated by the tone Mühlfeld could create with his clarinet, almost like the sound of a human voice. Soon Brahms was calling him nicknames like “my dear nightingale” and “my prima donna”; it was clear he had found a new muse.
That summer, Brahms returned to his summer home, where he emerged from his retirement to create two late masterpieces, the Clarinet Quintet and the Clarinet Trio in A Minor. A few years later, he followed up with two additional gifts for Mühlfeld and all clarinetists since, the Opus 120 clarinet sonatas. Like many of his post-retirement works, the Clarinet Sonata No. 2 in E-flat Major is lyrical and contemplative, with a sense of melancholy that extends between its three movements. Together with the first sonata, it represents the first major contribution to the clarinet sonata repertoire, as well as the final chamber music written by Johannes Brahms.
— Ethan Allred
- SERGEI PROKOFIEV 5 Mélodies, Op. 35bis
In 1920, Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev set out for the United States with high hopes for what awaited him across the Atlantic. Unfortunately, his travels got off to a rough start. Not only had one of his suitcases been stolen, but the highly anticipated Chicago premiere of his opera Love for Three Oranges fell apart.
That December, eager for a change of scenery, Prokofiev journeyed to California to perform a series of piano recitals. He found himself astonished by California’s varied landscape and mild weather. As he wrote from Los Angeles, “I’m as ecstatic about California as it is about me.”
Filled with inspiration, Prokofiev put the finishing touches on Five Songs without Words for Voice and Piano, which would later become 5 Mélodies, Op. 35bis. Echoing Felix Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words, each song explores a different facet of the beauty of melody, radiating the contentment Prokofiev felt during his Californian sojourn.
— Ethan Allred
- MENDELSSOHN Selected “Songs Without Words” for Solo Piano
In 19th-century Germany, pianos provided an important source of entertainment in many middle-class households. Composers could make a decent living writing music for these family pianists to perform, and hence Felix Mendelssohn wrote his magnificent Songs without Words, published in eight volumes of six songs each.
As their title suggests, Mendelssohn wanted his Songs without Words to capture the lyricism and emotional journey of a song using only the piano. In response to an inquiry about their inspiration, Mendelssohn captured their essence perfectly, writing, “If you ask me what I had in mind when I wrote [a Song without Words], I would say: just the song as it is. And if I happen to have certain words in mind for one or another of these songs, I would never want to tell them to anyone, because the same words never mean the same things to others. Only the song can say the same thing, can arouse the same feelings in one person as in another.”— Ethan Allred
- PAUL SCHOENFELD Trio for Clarinet, Violin and Piano
Freylakh
March
Nigun
KozatskeThe music of American composer Paul Schoenfeld defies classification. With strong roots in Jewish music, Schoenfeld has created a provocative style that blends folk, popular, and classical influences, eliciting comparisons to other genre-defying composers like George Gershwin and Astor Piazzolla.
Earlier in his career, Schoenfeld performed widely as a pianist, even recording Béla Bartók’s music for violin and piano with Chamber Music Northwest founder Sergiu Luca. Schoenfeld’s ongoing connection with Chamber Music Northwest deepened in 1986, when current CMNW Artistic Director David Shifrin asked him to write a clarinet trio. Schoenfeld followed through in 1990 with the Trio for Clarinet, Violin and Piano, which he premiered in Portland in 1991 with Shifrin on clarinet and Ik-Hwan Bae on violin.
In his description of the trio, Schoenfeld writes that it “realizes a long-standing desire to create entertaining music that could be played at Chassidic gatherings as well as in the concert hall.” The first movement, Freylakh, reinterprets a jubilant Eastern European Jewish dance. Schoenfeld describes the March, which alludes to festive Chassidic court music, as “bizarre and somewhat diabolical.” The inspiration for Nigun comes from a slow, mystical tradition of improvised Chassidic religious music, and the trio closes with a klezmer-like Kozatske, or “Cossack dance,” commonly heard at Jewish wedding ceremonies.
— Ethan Allred
Artists
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David Shifrin
Clarinet & Artistic Director Emeritus 1981–2020
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Clarinetist David Shifrin graduated from the Interlochen Arts Academy in 1967 and the Curtis Institute in 1971. He made his debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra having won the Orchestra’s Student Competition in 1969. He went on to receive numerous prizes and awards worldwide, including the Geneva and Munich International Competitions, the Concert Artists Guild auditions, and both the Avery Fisher Career Grant (1987) and the Avery Fisher Prize (2000).
Shifrin received Yale University’s Cultural Leadership Citation in 2014 and is currently the Samuel S. Sanford Professor in the Practice of Clarinet at the Yale School of Music where he teaches a studio of graduate-level clarinetists and coaches chamber music ensembles. He is also the artistic director of Yale’s Oneppo Chamber Music Society and the Yale in New York concert series. Shifrin previously served on the faculties of the Juilliard School, the University of Southern California, the University of Michigan, the Cleveland Institute of Music, and the University of Hawaii.
Shifrin served as artistic director of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center from 1992 to 2004 and Chamber Music Northwest in Portland, Oregon from 1981 to 2020. He has appeared as soloist with major orchestras in the United States and abroad and has served as Principal Clarinet with the Cleveland Orchestra, American Symphony Orchestra (under Stokowski), the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and the Symphony Orchestras of New Haven, Honolulu, and Dallas. Shifrin also continues to broaden the clarinet repertoire by commissioning and championing more than 100 works of 20th and 21st century American composers. Shifrin’s recordings have consistently garnered praise and awards including three Grammy nominations and “Record of the Year” from Stereo Review.
Shifrin is represented by CM Artists in New York and performs on Backun clarinets and Légère reeds.
Upcoming Concerts & Events
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Gloria Chien
Piano & Artistic Director
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Taiwanese-born pianist Gloria Chien has one of the most diverse musical lives as a noted performer, concert presenter, and educator. She made her orchestral debut at the age of sixteen with the Boston Symphony Orchestra with Thomas Dausgaard, and she performed again with the BSO with Keith Lockhart. She was subsequently selected by The Boston Globe as one of its Superior Pianists of the year, “who appears to excel in everything.” In recent seasons, she has performed as a recitalist and chamber musician at Alice Tully Hall, the Library of Congress, the Dresden Chamber Music Festival, and the National Concert Hall in Taiwan. She performs frequently with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. In 2009, she launched String Theory, a chamber music series in Chattanooga, Tennessee that has become one of the region’s premier classical music presenters. The following year she was appointed director of the Chamber Music Institute at Music@Menlo, a position she held for the next decade.
In 2017, she joined her husband, violinist Soovin Kim, as artistic director of the Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival in Burlington, Vermont. The duo became artistic directors at Chamber Music Northwest in Portland, Oregon in 2020. They were named recipients of Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s Award for Extraordinary Service in 2021 for their efforts during the pandemic.
Most recently, Gloria was named Advisor of the newly launched Institute for Concert Artists at the New England Conservatory of Music. Gloria released two albums—her Gloria Chien LIVE from the Music@Menlo LIVE label and Here With You with acclaimed clarinetist Anthony McGill on Cedille Records.
Gloria received her bachelor, master’s, and doctoral degrees at the New England Conservatory of Music with Wha Kyung Byun and Russell Sherman. She is Artist-in-Residence at Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee, and she is a Steinway Artist.
Upcoming Concerts & Events
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Soovin Kim
2025 YAI Faculty, Violin & Artistic Director
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Soovin Kim enjoys a broad musical career regularly performing Bach sonatas and Paganini caprices for solo violin, sonatas for violin and piano ranging from Beethoven to Ives, Mozart, and Haydn concertos and symphonies as a conductor, and new world-premiere works almost every season. When he was 20 years old, Kim received first prize at the Paganini International Violin Competition. He immersed himself in the string quartet literature for 20 years as the 1st violinist of the Johannes Quartet. Among his many commercial recordings are his “thrillingly triumphant” (Classic FM Magazine) disc of Paganini’s demanding 24 Caprices and a two-disc set of Bach’s complete solo violin works that were released in 2022.
Kim is the founder and artistic director of the Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival (LCCMF) in Burlington, Vermont. In addition to its explorative programming and extensive work with living composers, LCCMF created the ONE Strings program through which all 3rd through 5th grade students of the Integrated Arts Academy in Burlington study violin. The University of Vermont recognized Soovin Kim’s work by bestowing an Honorary Doctorate upon him in 2015. In 2020, he and his wife, pianist Gloria Chien, became artistic directors of Chamber Music Northwest in Portland, Oregon. He, with Chien, were awarded Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s 2021 CMS Award for Extraordinary Service to Chamber Music. Kim devotes much of his time to his passion for teaching at the New England Conservatory in Boston and the Yale School of Music in New Haven.
Upcoming Concerts & Events