The Delaware Chamber Music Festival kicks off Friday June 12. It consists of four concerts over two weekends at the Music School of Delaware in Wilmington.
After thirty seasons, the Delaware Chamber Music Festival remains one of the best kept secrets in the First State. To celebrate their three decades long milestone, DCMF Artistic Director Barbara Govatos says she’s curated an anniversary set list that blends traditional and contemporary classical music.
“You’ll hear music of course that you'd expect like Schubert and Brahms,” she says. “And then you’ll have music that maybe you’ve never even heard the composer’s name but it’s from a period of music that you like, and you’ll get familiar with somebody you didn’t know before and actually end up loving the music.”
The festival will also include a piece by American composer, George Crumb who taught at the University of Pennsylvania for thirty years.
There’s plucking inside of the piano and strumming of the strings inside the piano,” she says of Crumb’s ‘ Four Nocturnes for violin and piano.’ “And he asks for every violin technique possible, so playing ponticello which means on the bridge with the bow, plucking the strings with one movement that’s completely pizzicato, there’s lots of harmonics that are difficult to play but sometimes create a very eerie sound.”
For more information on the Delaware Chamber Music Festival, visit its website.
This piece is made possible, in part, by a grant from the Delaware Division of the Arts, a state agency dedicated to nurturing and supporting the arts in Delaware, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts.